


Handbook of Demonology

by squirenonny



Series: The Persephone Circle [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Allura takes exception to this classification, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Demon AU, Galra and Alteans are commonly lumped together as 'demons', Gen, Keith and Shiro and Lance are psychic, Keith and Shiro are Adoptive Siblings, Klance undertones but romance isn't the main focus, Lance is a bad stage psychic (except he's actually really good), Modern Witchcraft AU, She/Her Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Tarot, The characters are all witches, Trans Pidge | Katie Holt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-24
Updated: 2017-04-13
Packaged: 2018-09-26 11:31:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 47,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9894662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squirenonny/pseuds/squirenonny
Summary: This psychic—Lance the Lucid, according to the posters, and Keith wasn’t even going to comment on that—was a charlatan, plain and simple, and Keith kind of wanted to punch him. Sure, Lance knew how to put on a show, but Keith doubted there was anything more to the act than charm and dramatic flair.Pidge sighed, catching Keith’s eyes. “At this point, they’re pretty much our only hope.”--While searching for the truth behind their families' disappearance, Keith and Pidge hire a pair of amateur witches to help summon the demon Zarkon. They accidentally summon Allura instead.





	1. Summoning Circles

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pechat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pechat/gifts).



> Written for Fandom Trumps Hate for Pechat, who had so many awesome story ideas it was hard to choose just one. But when I saw a witchcraft AU where the team tries to summon Zarkon and gets Allura instead, I knew I needed to write that. So... here it is! (The first chapter, anyway.)
> 
> Inspiration for the magic system comes from all over but mostly: The Raven Cycle, Brandon Sanderson's works (notably Rithmatist and Elantris), and Jonathan Stroud (notably Lockwood & Co, but tiny bits of Bartimaeus might have slipped in as well.) Enjoy!

> _Summoning circles are the first and most important skill for any prospective demonologist to master. With a properly anchored and warded circle, a witch can safely make contact with denizens of Altea. Weak wards may allow the summoned demon to escape, putting the witches and nearby civilians at risk._ _With an improperly anchored circle, results may be even more dire. At best, such a ritual will fail to make contact with the higher plane. At worst, the witches involved might meet the same end as the infamous Persephone Circle._

\--From the Garrison School of Spellcraft's _Handbook of Demonology, Chapter 1: Summoning Circles_

* * *

 

“Okay, look, I’m gonna be honest with you, okay bud? You need to stop. No-no-no, shh. Just listen. I know you mean well, but you’re taking this _way_ too far. Be honest. You know you are. Am I right? Don’t answer that. I know I am.”

The young man on the makeshift stage gave a lopsided smile, tapped his mark’s palm twice, then fluttered his hands to send the man back into the audience.

“Oh!” the young psychic called. “And might I recommend a calming draught? My man over there in the booth makes a mean lavender tea—just ten bucks a tin!”

The mark hesitated a moment, then turned and trudged over to the booth beside the stage, where the so-called psychic’s partner sat guard over teas, herb pouches, bottled potions, and even a few talismans—average make, nothing like Pidge’s.

Keith surveyed the whole set up and scoffed. “You’ve _got_ to be kidding me.”

“You know, now that I’ve seen him in action I kinda wish I was,” Pidge muttered, shrinking into his shadow as the crowd milled around them.

Quite a few people had stopped to watch the performance, clearly intrigued by the offer of free psychic readings. Never mind that everything Keith had seen so far was pure bunk. Palmistry, tea leaves (“Buy your own tea for home readings! Just fifteen dollars for the kit!”) The so-called psychic had even gone on a phrenology tangent with a pretty girl, clearly using it as an excuse to run his fingers through her hair.

This psychic—Lance the Lucid, according to the posters, and Keith wasn’t even going to _comment_ on that—was a charlatan, plain and simple, and Keith kind of wanted to punch him. Sure, Lance knew how to put on a show, but Keith doubted there was anything more to the act than charm and dramatic flair.

Pidge sighed, catching Keith’s eyes. “At this point, they’re pretty much our only hope.”

Groaning, Keith found a pillar to lean against to wait out the rest of the show. Lance and his partner had set up shop in one corner of a re-purposed warehouse whose outer walls had been knocked down to let in sunshine and a cool breeze. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, this space housed a farmer’s market, local bands hoping to make it big and, apparently, amateur witches.

Another volunteer from the crowd raised her hand, and Lance waved her up onstage with him. He took her hand in his, kissed her knuckles with a bow and a flourish, then turned her hand over and began tracing lines.

Keith scowled. “Palmistry, Pidge! You _know_ that’s--”

“I know, I know.” Pidge held up her hands. “I think that’s part of the gimmick.”

“You mean the con?” Keith narrowed his eyes at Lance—still fluttering his eyelashes at the latest mark—and then at his partner by the potions. How many of those bottles were filled with rosewater and a triple helping of lies?

“He’s for real.”

Keith gave Pidge a hard look, and she scowled.

“I mean it. His shows are a lot of fluff, but they _have_ to be. As long as it’s all fake, he can say it’s just for entertainment, and he doesn’t need a license. But I did my research. He’ll do.”

Keith noticed that Pidge didn’t say Lance was _good_ , which meant she was at least being honest. Because Lance wasn’t _good_. He couldn’t be, if he wasn’t accredited.

Granted, Keith and Pidge weren’t accredited either, but that was because Pidge, at sixteen, was too young for anything but an apprentice permit and Keith… Well, Keith had burned some bridges in his life. He wasn’t denying that. The point was, they were exceptions—and they weren’t trying to make their living with spellcraft. These people were, so they would have at least tried for accreditation, which meant better rates and more customers. Accreditation was a guarantee of skill, and Keith would have very much liked to hire someone who knew what they were doing.

But Keith and Pidge couldn’t hire licensed witches for this job. Good enough was just going to have to work.

They lingered at the back of the crowd for another twenty minutes. People stopped to watch, then meandered onward to look at bruised apples, honey sticks, hippie art, and the other jumbled assortment of offerings present today. No one paid any mind to the stone-faced pair by the concrete pillar.

Eventually Lance sent the last volunteer on his way with a not-so-subtle nudge toward the merchandise, then thanked everyone for stopping by and said he’d be happy to do some private consultation. For a nominal fee, of course.

Unsurprisingly, no one took him up on the offer. Free readings were one thing, but if people wanted to pay for the service, licensed witches with psychic talents were a dime a dozen. Maybe they’d charge twice as much as the farmer’s market freelancer, but at least you knew you were getting honest insight.

A few people did head over to Lance’s partner—tea was tea, and enough people made their own herb pouches anyway that they didn’t mind paying for the convenience of a pre-assembled deal. Pidge watched the dispersing crowd like she was trying to calculate the ideal time to strike up a casual-but-carefully-private conversation.

Keith wasn’t that patient.

He crossed to the stage in a few purposeful strides, Pidge yelping as she gave chase, and waited for Lance to notice him.

A dazzling smile appeared as soon as Lance spotted them, and he gave an odd little flourish with his hands as he beckoned them closer. “Come on, come on. Don’t be shy!” he said, as if Keith wasn’t already stalking up to him, only stopping when they stood nose to nose.

Keith heard Pidge’s sigh at his shoulder and chose not to acknowledge it. “You’re a witch.”

“Psychic,” Lance said, not missing a beat. “You can consider me your personal guide to the realm of the metaphysical.”

“ _Psychic_ isn’t a regulated title,” Keith said. He and Pidge had been searching for helpers for weeks now, too long for Keith’s tastes, and he wasn’t in the mood to banter with the sort of guy who swindled soccer moms out of cash. “Either you’re a witch, or you’re a con artist.”

Lance raised an eyebrow. “You saw what I do,” he said. “You think a con artist could pull off live readings?”

“They’re called cold reads,” Keith said flatly, “and they’ve been around way longer than the Garrison and all its regulations.”

“Keith...” Pidge elbowed him in the side hard enough to leave him breathless. “Try to remember that we need his help.”

Interest sparked in Lance’s eyes, and he crossed his arms, looking suddenly very smug. “My help? Ooh, sounds important. You sure you wanna trust a _con artist_ with the fate of your families?”

Keith had been glaring at Pidge, but Lance’s words snapped his head around as a chill shot down his spine. That infuriatingly self-satisfied twinkle hadn’t left Lance’s eye, but it was joined now by something darker, something deeper. Psychics—real psychics—had a way of looking at you like they could see inside your skull. Keith’s brother had worn that look more often than not, near the end.

“Our families?” Pidge scoffed, managing to hide her discomfort—aside from the hand that rose to clutch at her pendant, a talisman she’d made. It didn’t offer any tangible protection, but she claimed it helped her focus. Keith had learned a long time ago that when Pidge said she’d made a talisman a certain way, it was best to take her word for it. “What makes you think this has to do with _them_?”

Lance studied them for a moment, his blue eyes far sharper than Keith could reconcile with the sweet-talking swindler who’d commanded the crowd moments before. “You’re worried, but not for yourselves,” he said. “Whoever it is you’re trying to help, they’re family. Maybe not by blood,” he added, looking now squarely at Keith. “But they _are_ family.”

It took a tremendous effort not to back down from that stare. Keith disliked psychics, as a general rule. He’d only ever trusted Shiro to look into the Unseen and give reliable answers. Everyone else tried to hedge their bets, giving only general advice and dancing around the issue until they knew what their customers wanted to hear. It didn’t matter what technique they used—tarot, auras, dreams, or visions. It was always the same fortune cookie bullshit.

Possibly this was the same. Keith and Pidge had been careful not to talk about their task, even to each other, in case Lance had ears in the crowd. He couldn’t have _known_ they were here about the Persephone Circle.

He could have guessed, though. Keith figured it was a pretty safe bet; most things that drew people to psychics could be tied back to the customer themself, or to their family and friends. Lance had seen them approach together, heard Pidge say _we_ , and he’d taken the risk.

Except he’d said _families_. Plural. It seemed an unnecessary risk to take.

Keith clenched his jaw, refusing to let himself go down that rabbit hole. It was very difficult to tell a psychic from a swindler, which was why accreditation was such a big deal. Let the Garrison deal with the headache of proving the supernatural. Rest easy with their raven sigil distinguishing the good eggs from the rest.

“I can see you’re not convinced,” Lance said, sighing like they were inconveniencing him by offering him a job. “All right, all right. I’m not really in the habit of doing free readings--”

Keith glanced pointedly to the _Lance the Lucid_ poster hanging beside the stage.

Lance huffed. “Free _private_ readings,” he amended. “Not like this is getting me exposure. _But…_ I’ll give you one question. Anything you like. If you’re not convinced, we’ll go our separate ways, no harm done. But when I prove that I’m the real deal, you hire me for whatever this job of yours is.”

“This job that you know nothing about,” Pidge said.

Lance grinned. “Hey, a paycheck’s a paycheck.”

Pidge glanced at Keith, who shrugged. He let her pick the question—she was every bit as skeptical as he was, but she’d put in the time researching different schools of magic to know how best to prove or disprove Lance’s supernatural claim.

She took her time thinking about it, watching Lance only casually, her gaze roving around the market.

It settled on the booth, where Lance’s partner was wrapping up a couple of glass vials for the last customer. A slow smile spread across Pidge’s face, and she glanced slyly at Lance. “All right, I’ve got it.”

“Shoot.”

Lance was the very image of confidence, leaning backwards on the little table displaying pamphlets and business cards and signed photographs, of all things. His eyes were half-lidded, his smirk that same just-shy-of-flirting look he’d given half his volunteers.

So when Pidge turned and stalked over to the merchandise table, Lance choked on a cry of indignation and lost his balance, scattering a pile of pamphlets on the ground.

Chuckling, Keith trailed after Pidge, curious to see what she was up to. She ran her eyes over the wares, bending over to squint at potion vials, sniffing the lukewarm tea samples Lance’s partner had set out. The talismans nestled on cushions along one side followed standard patterns, well made but not especially inventive. Keith figured they weren’t the house specialty—that honor went no doubt to the potions, which were arranged in neat little racks with neat little writing on the labels. There were dozens of them, everything from headache cures to trance inducers to memory aids to one bright yellow one in the back that claimed to make the user’s skin impenetrable for an hour.

Pidge took her time surveying the wares, ignoring the curious stares of both Lance and his partner. Then, quite abruptly, she straightened, pulled a carved wooden dowel out of her pocket and dangled it in front of the big guy’s nose.

“Can you tell me what kind of charm this is?” she asked sweetly.

Lance squawked a protest. “Hang on! I thought you were testing _me_ , not Hunk!”

Pidge’s smile turned savage. “You said any question I wanted, didn’t you? Besides, we don’t need a psychic—any witch will do. A potioneer might be better, actually. We’ve already got a psychic.” She flashed Keith a smile, and he scowled at her, resisting the urge to remind her that he _wasn’t_ a psychic. He just… had psychic-like tendencies.

Pidge waggled her talisman at Hunk, leaning forward eagerly. “Well? What kind of charm?”

Hunk glanced at Lance before he took the charm, then turned it over in his hands. “This looks like a custom job,” he said, running his thumb along the carvings. “I’m surprised it’s made out of wood. I mean, that’s not unheard of. Just, most witches prefer stone or metal—harder to dull the charm that way. I’ve only seen a few wooden talismans before, usually oak. This isn’t oak.” He squinted at it. “That’s, what? Walnut? Huh.”

“Huh? What’s that mean, ‘ _huh?’”_ Pidge was starting to get prickly, the way she always did when people questioned her talismans. Keith refused to respond to her indignant look—she’d brought this on herself, asking a stranger’s opinion of her work. How was Hunk supposed to know about Pidge’s skill?

Sure, most people might have used river rocks and metal bands as their base. Most people never bothered to figure out how the material affected the charm. Keith didn’t understand it either, to be honest, but he wasn’t a taslismaner. He knew only what Pidge had told him: stone and metal were solid, but relatively inert. Other materials made the charms stronger, as long as you knew what you were doing.

Pidge preferred wood and glass and—most of all—circuit boards she’d pried out of defunct electronics.

“It’s nothing,” Hunk said, distracted. “Just surprising.” He wiped a finger down the length of the talisman, then rubbed his fingers together, muttering under his breath. Keith could only make out a few words— _transitory helix, astral resonance…_ It sounded like the sort of supernatural jargon Pidge used, which Keith had learned to tune out.

Eventually, Hunk sat back, shaking his head.

“I don’t know. Look, I’ll be honest, talismans aren’t really my thing. It looks like some kind of dowsing rod, maybe? But if it is, I couldn’t tell you what it’s looking for. All I know is whoever made it’s a genius.”

Pidge beamed as she took the talisman back from Hunk and tucked it away in her pocket. “Good answer,” she said. “You’re hired.”

* * *

“You realize he was just stroking your ego,” Keith said, lying on his back on the couch in their shared apartment, his legs hooked over the arm. Pidge sat beside him, curled into a ball with a cup of tea balanced on her knees.

She scowled at him. “Hunk is a very competent potioneer, and he knows high quality talismans when he sees them.”

Keith arched one eyebrow, the effect slightly lessened by the way he had to look up at her, upside down, his hair pooling beneath his head. “You saw the way Lance worked that crowd. They’re con artists, Pidge.”

“He knew it was a dowsing rod,” she argued. “My charm doesn’t look _anything_ like the standard dowsing charm! If they’re conmen, they know their stuff. Or, well, Hunk does at least. Besides, once we tell them what we’re doing, we’ll know. No one tries to summon a demon if they don’t know the theory.”

“That’s what I’m worried about.”

Pidge slurped her tea loudly, watching him over the rim. He knew it was all part of her pre-summoning ritual (a binge rewatching of _Stranger Things_ before bed the night before, sleeping in till noon, a bowl of cereal, an hour on crafting, and a mug of mango mate before she got down to business.)

He still couldn’t help feeling like she did it to annoy him. All the slurping, the whining about her fogged-up glasses, begging Keith to blow on her cup because it was too hot. ("It’s boiling water, Pidge," he told her, like always. "Of course it’s hot." Just another part of the ritual.)

Keith glanced at the clock, groaning. “They’re late.”

“By two minutes.”

“They said they’d be here at four.”

“I don’t see you getting the circle set up.”

Keith pushed himself up on his elbows, frowning at the space they’d cleared on the floor. Their apartment was a mess of spell books, half-finished talismans, tarot cards (most of them crumpled in fits of rage after yet another failed reading), and dirty dishes. The hazards of letting a sixteen-year-old runaway crash with a nineteen-year-old Garrison dropout.

But there _was_ bare linoleum visible beneath the clutter, and enough of it for a full five-person circle.

With a huff, Keith flopped backwards on the couch. “There’s no point doing any more work until we know whether or not these scammers are gonna stick around.”

“They seemed pretty desperate for cash.”

“Desperate enough to summon a demon?” Keith asked. “Hardly anyone risks that anymore.”

Pidge didn’t answer, and Keith didn’t press. There had been a time when summonings were as common as tarot readings or talismans. That was before the Turn. Before demons started breaking contract left and right. Before people started getting killed.

Now demonology was strictly regulated. No one was allowed to sell the service. No one was supposed to do it at all, outside of the Hunters’ warded laboratories, but the Garrison couldn’t restrict what it didn’t know was happening. As long as the demon didn’t get out, they were probably safe.

Keith wondered if Hunk and Lance would see it that way.

At four eighteen, finally, someone knocked on the door. Pidge and Keith stared at each other in a silent battle of wills that Pidge lost. She sighed dramatically, set her mug down on the plastic tote they used as a coffee table, and went to answer the door.

The sound of chipper greetings dragged Keith upright on the couch, though he didn’t bother to stand as Pidge stepped aside to let Hunk and Lance in. Hunk, at least, had the decency to smother his surprise at the state of the apartment.

Lance, on the other hand, wrinkled his nose in disgust. “I thought you said we were meeting at your apartment, not your junkyard.”

Keith glanced at Pidge. “You said three’s basically as good as four for this sort of thing, right?”

She smiled, stepping on a low mound of old pizza boxes as she edged her way around the pair of bewildered guests toward the bedrooms. “I did. You can go whenever you want to, Lance.”

“Excuse you.” Lance crossed his arms, pouting. “What do you mean three’s just as good as four? That’s not—that’s not _numerology,_ is it? Pssh. And you called my show a scam.”

Keith leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Yeah, see, here’s the thing: Pidge’s numbers bear out. Not so sure about your palmistry.”

Hunk held up his hands, glancing between Keith and Lance and Pidge, who had just emerged from her bedroom with a cardboard box full of candles, talismans, chalk, and thin iron chains. “Let’s just… take a time-out here, okay? You said you had a job that you needed more witches for, but that it wasn’t the sort of thing you could talk about in public?”

“Which is _super_ skeevy, by the way,” Lance said, tossing himself down on the folding chair across from the sofa. “I’m just saying, we’re doing you a favor by being here right now.”

Pidge grabbed the salt shaker from the kitchen counter and dropped her load in the middle of the empty floor space with a _thud_ that made Lance jump. Once he saw the box, though, his expression darkened.

“Woah, hold on. You didn’t say anything about summoning.”

“I told you they weren’t real witches,” Keith said, stretching his hands over his head. “Probably don’t even know how to build a ward.”

Hunk looked even more nervous than Lance, glancing from Keith to Pidge with wide eyes. “Yeah, no. It’s not whether or not we can summon that worries me, it’s whether or not we’re still gonna be around when it’s over.”

With a scoff, Pidge dropped onto the couch beside Keith, crossing her legs beneath her. “Summonings are perfectly safe as long as you’re careful.”

“Which we are,” Keith added.

Lance waved a hand. “Safe or not, they’re still illegal. I mean what the hell?”

“Yeah, well...” Pidge glanced at Keith and blew out a breath. They were in too deep to have second thoughts now. “What do you guys know about the Persephone Circle?”

Lance’s eyes widened slightly before his face became a mask of practiced indifference. “They’re the ones who started the Turn, right?”

“That’s _not_ what happened,” Pidge growled, and Keith grabbed her wrist before she could leap across the room at Lance.

But there was that far-off look in Lance’s eyes again, like he was looking at something the rest of them couldn’t see. “Woah, jeez, fine.” He held up his hands toward Pidge, but his gaze was stuck on Keith. “So what was this vision about?”

Keith felt his hackles rise in that way only psychics could trigger. “ _What_ vision?” he growled.

“The one about the Persephone Circle, I’m assuming.”

“We didn’t say anything about a vision,” Pidge said. She was a better liar by far than Keith, and she managed to sound genuinely confused, not that it had any impact on Lance. “Keith’s not that kind of psychic.”

It should have been a believable lie—real psychics were relatively rare, even among witches, and the vast majority had to use tarot cards to focus their gift. Anyone could learn to summon, or to brew potions, or to make talismans, but you were born a psychic.

Lance arched an eyebrow. “Funny aura you’ve got for not that kind of psychic,” Lance said. His eyes were uncanny, sharp and attentive, and Keith cursed his luck. It figured Lance knew how to read auras—that was the trickiest of the psychic arts to hone, and even rarer than visions, but in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing, it was often the most useful.

With dreams and visions, you had to wait for the answers to come, and though they were often incredibly specific, they were also very narrow in scope. Tarot was only as specific as your question; it couldn’t tell you what you didn’t ask.

Auras were an open book, omnipresent and exhaustive in scope. As long as you knew the language, they could tell you almost anything you wanted to know. It was no wonder Lance’s psychic show had drawn such a crowd.

Keith just hoped Lance’s skill wasn’t as big as his ego.

“Fine,” Keith said, knowing it was useless to keep up the act. They were going to tell Hunk and Lance about the vision anyway—though Keith would have preferred it if the choice of when and how had stayed in his hands. “Yes, I had a vision.”

“About the Persephone Circle,” Lance said, and when Keith frowned at him, he fluttered a hand. “Sorry. Continue.”

Keith suppressed the urge to growl. “I was the one who found their pentacle.”

Hunk’s brow furrowed at that, but Lance just nodded, like he already knew that. Like he knew that Shiro had been part of the Persephone Circle, along with Pidge’s dad and brother. Like he knew that they’d done their rituals in the apartment Shiro and Keith shared back when Keith attended the Garrison School of Spellcraft.

Keith had had to go in for a midnight mock hunt that night, and he’d been dead on his feet by the time he made it home sometime around three. It had taken several tries to get the key in the lock, and he’d stumbled through the door, ready to drop on the couch and sleep until Shiro woke him with the smell of breakfast cooking on the stove.

Instead, he’d found the apartment thick with sulfur and ash, pentacle burned into the floorboards, candles burned to stubs. The chains were still in place, the salt line unbroken, but Shiro, Matt, and Sam were just… _gone_.

For a moment he’d just stood there, staring, his tired brain struggling to piece together what had happened. Leaving the door wide open, he’d run for Shiro’s bedroom, half expecting to find him asleep there. Maybe the ritual had left him exhausted, and he’d gone to bed without cleaning up, never mind that he always did things by the books, the way the Hunters had taught him. Never mind that summoning circles weren’t supposed to _burn_ , or that the sulfur scent said the ritual was fresh.

When it became clear that Shiro wasn’t in the apartment, Keith tried his cell.

It rang, too loud in the silent apartment, from its spot on the kitchen table. That was when Keith started to panic.

The vision had hit as he dialed 911.

_Candles burned cheerily. Voices spoke, garbled and unintelligible. Keith recognized Shiro’s laugh._

_Three figures knelt, each in their respective circle at the first, third, and fourth points of the pentacle._

_The smell of sulfur stung his nose._

_Then, fear. A blur of shadows, a dark mist that blotted out the candles’ glows. A face. A voice._

_A name._

“Zarkon?” Lance asked, when Keith was done with his story. “Is that a demon?”

Keith shrugged. “We think so, but we’ve checked all the records. No one’s encountered him before, no one’s even heard of him. But he knows what happened to the Persephone Circle.”

Hunk snorted. “Knows? Sounds to me like he was responsible. Why the heck do you want to _summon_ him?”

“Because he’s the best shot we have at getting answers.” Pidge spoke gruffly, her eyes locked on the candles poking haphazardly from the box of supplies. “So. Are you in?”

Drumming his fingers on his leg, Hunk glanced at Lance. “I don’t know about this, Lance. It sounds like a bad idea, but… You know I trust your instincts.”

So it was down to Lance. Of course it was. Keith tried not to bristle as Lance stared at him, searching, considering. It was unnerving, like standing before his instructors at the Garrison as they critiqued his performance on a drill. _Why_ had Pidge decided these two were the best ones to bring in? Just because they were freelancers, used to skirting the law? Or was there more to it than that? Pidge never did anything without a reason.

“What’s the payment?” Lance asked, his voice perfectly neutral. Keith couldn’t guess if he was hoping for a reason to decline that let him preserve his dignity, or if he was playing their desperation to get a bigger payout.

It didn’t make much of a difference, anyway. Keith and Pidge were practically broke, but Pidge had assured Keith she would handle the payment.

She glanced at him, and then at Lance, clutching the talisman around her neck. “Juniberries,” she said. “For each ritual you help us with, we’ll help you barter with a demon for juniberries.”

 _Juniberries?_ Keith tried not to let his confusion show. There were a few plants that grew in the demonic realm that had some medicinal purposes on Earth, and juniberries were among the most sought-after. They’d been common, once, but after the Turn it grew harder to find demons willing to harvest them. The price had skyrocketed, and by now the market had run nearly dry.

They were valuable, yes, and it would probably take a circle of three or more to find and bind a demon to harvest them, but it seemed an odd offer to make.

Lance didn’t seemed half so surprised. He paled, licked his lips, and nodded. “Deal.”

* * *

It took an hour to prepare. First was the salt around the edges of the room, to keep the demon from escaping and (perhaps more importantly) to keep the neighbors from figuring out what was happening. Pidge had already imbued the walls with spellwork to keep the noise level down and to guard against magical attacks, but redundancy was key.

Inside this was a smaller salt ring, surrounding the pentacle with its four summoning circles situated at four points of the star. Even numbers didn’t work well with summonings, as they left the pentacle unbalanced—five was the best, a solid defense and a steady flow; three worked especially well for piercing the veil; even one could be made to work in the case of a minor summoning.

But as with everything in the last year, they would just have to make do.

Each witch drew their own defensive circle outside the pentacle, connected only at the points of the star, and there were nearly as many styles as there were witches in the world. Keith used a modified version of the Garrison’s circle, drawn with a special ink and anchored with silver tacks at the cardinal directions. Pidge’s was a prefabricated circle of silver wire set in a talismaned frame.

Hunk and Lance used chalk—a common enough technique, though Keith had never liked how easily the lines smudged. For routine summonings, it worked just fine, but nothing was routine since the Turn. Their circles were oddly ornate, not anchored at the compass points, but crossed inside like miniature pentacles. Keith wondered what the theory behind it was.

That was a question for another time.

With the pentacle and anchoring circles drawn, Keith laid out the iron chain around the edge of the pentacle as the first line of defense—and hopefully the only defense they would need. Pidge lit candles at strategic points to visualize the currents in the room, both mundane and supernatural.

The four of them knelt in their circles, and Pidge recited the spell, her voice clear and low.

An otherworldly wind picked up, tossing the candles flames. Keith watched the motion, checking it against his memories. The wind was strong, but not to the point of alarm. Stronger demons caused greater disturbances when they were summoned, but as long as the disturbances stuck to the usual—a drop in temperature, the scent of sulfur, a steady wind that could be seen in the candles’ flames better than it could be felt—then they were all right.

Pidge pricked her thumb with a silver knife and pressed the cut to the point where her circle—the primary circle—joined the pentacle.

Suddenly the wind changed, tugging at Keith’s jacket. He stiffened, lifting his head to meet Pidge’s eyes across the circle. There was a shimmer in the air like the warping of air over a fire, and it distorted Pidge’s face, but the temperature continued to drop. Frost blossomed on the floor at the center of the pentacle.

“Uhh… is this normal for you guys?” Lance asked, sounding shaken for the first time since Keith had met him.

Keith didn’t bother to answer. He checked his lines, traced the path of the iron chain around the circle. As long as that remained unbroken--

With a _crack_ and a gust of wind that extinguished all the candles in the room, the summoning took root. Keith’s ears ached with a sudden rise in air pressure, and a force like a physical push tried to topple him, nearly carrying him out of his circle. He dropped low, bracing himself as best he could, even as he reached for the silver dagger at his waist. He’d only lost control of a summoning a handful of times—only once since the Turn—but that was more than enough to teach him wariness. An unbound, unshielded demon could slaughter a room full of people in the blink of an eye.

Keith wasn’t going to give Zarkon that chance.

He was the first to gain his footing, though Pidge wasn’t far behind. Lance seemed to have gotten tangled in his own jacket somehow, and Hunk seemed too terrified to move at all. Had they ever properly learned how to summon?

No time for that now. Keith turned to face the demon, ready for a fight.

But the face looking back at him, brown skin framed by shockingly white curls, was _not_ the face he’d seen in his vision.

The young woman—demon—struggled upright, blue eyes wide and frightened. “Where am I? Who are you? What happened to my father?”

Keith stared at her, dumbstruck. “You’re… not Zarkon.”

The demon stared back at him, fear swiftly fading to anger. “ _Zarkon?_ Of course I’m not Zarkon!”

“Then… who _are_ you?” Pidge asked.

The demon straightened, her head held high. “My name is Allura. I am the princess of Altea. And _you_ had better have a very good explanation for how and why you summoned me.”


	2. Bargains

> _Warded summonings can be maintained for only a short period: perhaps an hour, if all members of the circle are well-trained and experienced. Such summonings are routinely carried out to test wards, study the inter-planar connection established within the pentacle, and attempt to elicit information from demons._
> 
> _If the demon is expected to remain in our world longer than one hour, a binding contract is vital. Contract talismans bind both demon and summoner to the terms of their agreement as stated at the time of binding, so it's important to allow your summoned demon no leeway and to consider carefully the vows you make in return. Regulation contract talismans bear charms strong enough to kill any who break contract, whether human or demon._

\--From the Garrison School of Spellcraft's _Handbook of Demonology,_ Chapter 2: Bargains

* * *

Lance had never actually met a demon before. Somehow, he’d assumed they would be uglier.

Allura was definitely _not_ ugly. She wasn’t hairy or purple like the stories said, she didn’t have glowing yellow eyes or sharp claws or even fangs, so far as Lance could tell. She was just a young, pretty, dark-skinned woman with white hair. She could have passed for human if not for the pointed ears.

Well, that and the fact that she had no aura.

Lance was so used to ignoring auras when he wasn’t specifically searching for information that he didn’t realize it at first. There was no color around her, no texture, just a strange sort of shimmer that Lance’s eyes skimmed over—passed _through_. Like a Magic Eye puzzle.

She seemed dazed—that would be the summoning sickness, he supposed, and the fact that she wasn’t physically ill suggested she was far more powerful than any demon he’d tried to summon before.

Across the circle from Lance, Keith looked _pissed,_ and not just physically. His aura, already twelve shades of angry and full of little psychic brambles, was positively _crimson_ now. It seemed to throb in time with his hissing breath, a great big defensive bubble that screamed, _Please give me an excuse to stab you._

Keith had to be the only person in the world who would actually be disappointed to see a pretty girl instead of the creep who killed his brother. Or, well, one of two, because Pidge was pretty well over the edge into suspicionville, too, though her aura had an electric current of curiosity underlying the more off-putting stuff.

Both of them had some of the most restless auras Lance had ever seen. Even down to their deepest auras, the ones that were the most integral part of someone’s self. On most people, deep auras were relatively inert, even the complex ones. Hunk, for instance, had a nice, soothing yellow aura underneath all the layers that had to do with mood and stress level and priorities. Hunk, Lance liked to say, had a literal heart of gold—though of course when you got that deep, it wasn’t about color so much as feel. And Hunk’s deepest auras felt like a hug.

Keith and Pidge’s deep auras, on the other hand, were nearly as restless as everything else about them. Pidge felt like a hair dryer dropped into a bathtub, and Keith exuded all _kinds_ of hostility. If Hunk was a hug, then Keith was a swift kick to the groin.

And that was _before_ they summoned the wrong demon.

“What’s going on?” Allura demanded. Lance forgave her waspish tone, considering this was the third time she’d asked that. Lance had tried to answer once it became apparent the resident demonologists weren’t gonna do it, only to have Pidge glare at him.

It wasn’t her expression that shut him up so much as the way her aura flared out around her like those creepy frilled dinosaurs from _Jurassic Park_. A kaleidoscope of angry red and irritated orange and a shade of green that was way too sneaky for Lance’s taste danced around Pidge for an instant, and hardly dimmed when she turned to whisper frantically at Keith.

After that, Lance resigned himself to silence, flashing his most charming smile at Allura, who scowled at him. Light gathered around her shoulders, and for a second Lance thought she had an aura after all.

Keith and Pidge’s heads snapped up, violet fear snaking around their shoulder. Okay, so not an aura.

Swearing, Keith drove the tip of his silver dagger into the floorboards at the center of his defensive circle and muttered a spell—Lance thought it might be the inverse of the summoning spell, but he was too distracted by the lightning now crackling around Allura’s hands to be sure.

 _Definitely_ not an aura. Definitely sorcery.

Allura raised her hand toward Keith just as he finished his spell.

She didn’t disappear, and for an instant as Allura released a bolt of lightning, every single one of Keith’s auras turned a deep, liquid _black_ , not so much an aura as a sudden void that left an afterimage in Lance’s sight.

The lightning struck the protective barrier cast by the iron chain and splintered sideways. Dark shadows of Allura’s magic chased the lighting around the circle until it died, and Keith toppled backward, his shoulder coming dangerously near the edge of his protective circle—now visible as smaller electric currents skittered around the secondary barrier.

Keith glanced at Pidge, pale and wide-eyed. “I can’t dismiss her.”

Pidge’s aura contracted into a dense cloud of violet fear, then crusted over with frosty green. She snatched up what looked like a circuit board and slipped it into a hollow on her pre-fabricated defensive circle. “All right, demon,” she began, in a tone that said she meant business.

More lightning crackled around Allura’s frame, her hair lifting on currents of static electricity. “ _Don’t_ call me that.”

Pidge faltered. “Demon?”

“I’ve read of your human superstitions,” Allura said. “I know what it is you think we are. I am Allura of Altea, and I am _not_ a demon.”

“Okay, but… we summoned you,” Hunk said, and promptly shrunk down as Allura’s glare turned on him. “I mean—I’m just saying that— _technically—_ if we summoned you with a demon-summoning spell, doesn’t that, well, make you a demon?”

His voice was so small by the end that Lance could hardly hear him. His aura, in contrast, was big and messy, anxious tendrils coiling about him in a muddy sort of brownish hue.

Bristling, Lance sat forward, ignoring the way Pidge was muttering under her breath. Okay, so this was technically Lance’s first successful demonic summoning. Okay, so Allura was really, really powerful. Okay, so Lance was scared half out of his mind at the moment.

He was also really pissed. “Hey, look, princess,” he said, proud that he didn’t flinch as Allura turned on him. “We didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just a word. If you’re not human, you’re a demon, yeah?”

“I already told you, I’m not--” She stopped suddenly, shivering, then went still. It seemed to take a lot of effort to move, but she managed to tilt her head down, and Lance followed her wide-eyed gaze to a piece of broken mirror etched with runes that glowed faintly blue.

“Let’s try this again,” Pidge said. “I don’t care if you’re a demon or not. We summoned you, which means you’re bound by the laws of demonology—including contracts.”

Allura’s eyes narrowed. “You want to strike a bargain with me? _You_.”

Indignation sent a shiver through Pidge’s aura. “What’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

“Don’t let her distract you, Pidge,” Keith muttered. “The contract.”

Pidge growled under her breath, but nodded. “A demon—Altean, _whatever—_ did something to my family, and Keith’s. Help us find them.”

Allura huffed. “I am the princess of my realm, _human_. I don’t make deals. Now send me home.”

“I already tried,” Keith said. “It’s not working.”

“ _What?_ ” Allura jerked back—as much as Pidge’s talisman would let her—and the lightning surrounding her faltered. She caught herself then, and masked her expression. “Then you must have done something wrong.”

“I don’t make mistakes.”

Pidge leaned forward. “Look, your options are pretty limited here. Make a deal with us, or we’ll leave you immobilized in this circle until we figure out how the hell you hijacked our ritual.”

“Hijacked--” Allura began.

Pidge raised a shiny plastic button. “Do you want me to add a silencing charm to the mix, your highness? Because I will.”

Lance shifted uncomfortably in his circle, glancing from Keith to Pidge to Allura. “Woah, now. Hang on. Don’t you think that’s a little excessive?”

Pidge and Keith looked at him like he’d just said the sky was neon green.

“What?” he asked, a little defensive.

Keith’s aura pulsed with irritation. “You’ve never bargained with a demon before, have you?”

“I’m _not_ a--”

Keith cut Allura off with a gesture, and she huffed, blowing her hair out of her face.

Lance squirmed, glancing at Hunk. “Uh… well, not _technically_.”

For some reason, Keith looked at Pidge at that, and Pidge shrank under his glare. “I never said they were _good_ ,” she said.

“Hey!”

But Keith and Pidge ignored Lance, turning their attention back to Allura. Lance was beginning to wonder whether this had been a good idea. Sure, they’d promised him juniberries, but was that really worth the risk of illegally summoning demons with a couple of strangers?

Lance sighed, leaning back on his heels. _Of course it’s worth the risk,_ he thought. _You’d sell your own soul for some juniberries, and you know it._

“Psst. Hey. Hey, Lance.”

Lance glanced over at Hunk, who hunched down like he could lower the volume of his voice by making himself physically smaller. His aura said he wasn’t any more comfortable with the situation than Lance was, which just reminded Lance that this whole thing had been _his_ stupid idea.

“What’s up?” Lance whispered.

Hunk glanced at the others warily. “You know I’ve read a lot about demonology, right? Because of… well...”

“Yeah, yeah.” Lance waved his hand. “So?”

“So...” Hunk bit his lip, then forged onward. “They’ve got every right to be nervous. Even before the Turn, demons were notorious about trying to slip out of contracts. I mean, they weren’t malicious about it, they’re just… ruthless negotiators, yeah? Well it’s ten times worse, now. An un-contracted demon, or one who’s only bound by a weak agreement, can break free and attack people.”

Lance glanced at Allura. Even without an aura, he could tell she was fed up with the immobilizing charm, but she didn’t look like the murderous type. Okay, fine, so she’d tried to electrocute Keith. Who wouldn’t, given the chance?

“I dunno, Hunk. Something doesn’t feel right about this.”

But there was nothing to be done about it. They couldn’t send Allura back to the demonic realm, and Lance didn’t want to be killed by a demon _or_ arrested for an illegal summoning. So that left a contract.

The negotiations were long and boring, and Lance tuned out most of it, but eventually Pidge and Allura each spoke their respective vows.

“I swear to help you search for information about Sam and Matt Holt, Takashi Shirogane, and the _Galra_ \--” Allura emphasized this, her only change from Pidge’s recitation “--named Zarkon. If your family members are alive, I will aid in their rescue and help them return home safely. I will not attack them or the four of you or any other human now or after the fulfillment of my contract, until either you or I find a way to return me home.”

Pidge fished the shard of mirror out of the pentacle and tossed in another talisman—a circuit board to match the one in her own circle. Allura bit her thumb and smeared a drop of blood on the talisman, which flashed with a soft white light.

Then it was Pidge’s turn. “I swear to make every effort to return you to the realm you came from, whatever you happen to call it. I won’t restrain you with talismans or silver or iron—but I _will_ keep you inside this apartment with salt and spellwork; I’m not going to jail for you.”

Allura scowled, but nodded her acceptance of the bargain. Keith passed Pidge his silver knife, and she pricked her thumb and smeared her blood on her own circuit board talisman. It glowed with the same white light as Allura’s, and the glow raced out along the lines of the summoning circle. When the whole thing was lit up, it flashed once, brightly, then winked out.

Pidge slid the circuit board from her circle and tucked it in the pocket of her hoodie. Allura made the other talisman disappear somewhere inside her sleek white dress.

That seemed to be it, and Lance marveled at how all three of the negotiators could come out of the contract looking unhappy.

After a long, tense silence, Keith reached forward and began to undo the wards around the summon point. He twitched the iron chain aside, used his finger to dig a trench through the salt line, then spit on a rag and scrubbed away a small portion of the pentacle.

Allura relaxed a little more as each line of defense went down, and then she calmly stepped through the weak point in the circle and went to sit primly on the couch.

“So… we’re just gonna hang out with a demon now?” Lance asked. “Is that what’s happening?”

“I guess so.” Keith stood, his aura growing more thorny as he looked at Lance. “At least until we figure out what went wrong.”

He said this as he was coming over toward Lance and Hunk, squinting down at their defensive circles like he would find the problem there. Lance stood, crossing his arms, and silently dared Keith to make a comment.

Keith, of course, obliged. “Where did you learn this technique?”

“Why do you care?” Lance demanded, growing defensive. He wished Hunk would stop lurking behind him like a kid who’d been caught cutting his sister’s hair. “It works. That’s all you need to know.”

But Pidge had wandered over by now and stood tapping her chin as she studied the circles. Hunk’s was the simpler of the two, a six-pointed star inside two concentric circles. Lance had gone a little fancier with his, because he _could_ and it _didn’t matter anyway_ , as long as there was a complete circle and some form of reinforcement involving one of the supernaturally inert metals. So, yeah. Lance had added a couple layers—a triangle inside a pentagon inside an inverted pentagon inside his circle. A nice design put him at ease. So sue him.

Pidge stopped suddenly, eyes widening, and Hunk tried to disappear behind Lance as she looked up at the pair of them.

“Please tell me you didn’t base your summoning circles on Fullmetal Alchemist.”

Lance snorted, trying to appear unruffled. “Wow. Sounds like _someone_ here is an anime nerd.”

Pidge arched an eyebrow, and Hunk promptly lost his nerve. “Okay. Yes. Yes, fine, we did.”

“Hunk!” Lance whined.

“Sorry, Lance. But—Pidge—look. The theory is sound, okay? I mean, yeah, okay, so we used transmutation circles as inspiration, yeah, that’s fair. But I mean, we didn’t ever need to summon demons before the Turn, and by the time we started trying to learn no one would teach us, and the only visual guides we could find online seemed sketchy as Altea--”

“Excuse you!” Allura interrupted. “Altea is a realm of peace and enlightenment and--”

Hunk fluttered a hand in her direction, eyes never leaving Pidge. “We had to teach ourselves. We had the theory, but we had to design our own circles, and, yeah, okay. We had to start somewhere.”

Keith and Pidge were both positively iridescent with rage at this revelation, but Keith’s auras were so much more vivid in their anger than Pidge’s that Lance had to force himself not to take a step back as Keith advanced on them.

“Are you serious right now?” he asked, voice pitching high with incredulity. “You know what kind of demon we were trying to summon—and you come at it with this—this shitty cartoon doodle?”

Lance bristled. “Well excuse us, Mullet. Not everyone’s rich enough to buy a spot at the Garrison—or stupid enough to get kicked out.”

As a general rule, Lance enjoyed his talent for reading auras. He liked to think it made him a better friend—and if nothing else, it gave him a leg up in the social game. Best of all, it was usually a conscious decision whether or not to go poking through someone’s deep auras, so he didn’t generally have to worry about crossing a line.

Then there were those times his mind ran out ahead of itself, making connections and spitting them out before Lance had a chance to see whether or not commenting on a given secret was really a good idea.

The problem, he told himself, was that Keith’s auras were just too vivid. Overexposure to demonic energies would do that to a person, and both Keith and Pidge looked like they’d taken a dip in the ink pits of Altea.

The problem was that Keith projected everything so damn _loudly_ that Lance couldn’t completely tune him out. And, okay, fair, people who couldn’t read auras generally didn’t _know_ how to mute their own, but most people did that automatically to some degree or another. Not Keith, though. If auras were the soundtracks of people’s life, Keith was that one guy who belted out showtunes in his car.

The problem, really, was that those few times that Lance slipped and did an unconscious reading, his mind usually came up with weirdly specific details that Lance probably wouldn’t have reasoned out on his own. Like the fact that Keith had gone to the Garrison—he could see that aura now, buried deep and only half-formed, but as cold and slick as any demon hunter’s. Or the fact that he’d been kicked out—a jagged edge to his hunter’s aura, tinged white with pain.

Whatever the problem was, it had turned Keith’s face to stone, pale and hard and more than a little terrifying. Something wet and hot and _other_ flowed across his deep auras like an oil slick, just for an instant, and was gone.

“We’re done here,” Keith hissed.

Anger and guilt melted together inside Lance until he was filled with something hot and restless that clawed its way out of him. “Fine, jeez.” He straightened, adjusting his jacket, and glanced around the room briefly before realizing he hadn’t been here long enough to leave anything lying around. “Come on, Hunk,” he said, and headed for the door.

* * *

Lance remembered a time when his house was loud and lively. When his mother sang along to old records as she folded laundry, when his father still had the time and energy to cook a real family dinner each night. He remembered his brother, Mateo, hanging off his waist as he told Lance all about his day at school, then stopping suddenly and asking Lance to read his mind. (It never changed, no matter how many times Lance told him that wasn’t how auras worked.)

Mateo lay still and quiet now, already asleep. He was tired more often than not these days, and nearly always sick. A pile of tissues lay on the floor beside his bed, only a few of them hitting the target—a small trash can lined with grocery bags in case he woke up nauseous in the middle of the night.

Lance sat on the edge of Mateo’s bed and smoothed back his hair. He had a fever again, and he shivered at Lance’s touch.

“Sorry,” Lance whispered, too soft to disturb Mateo—god knew he needed all the rest he could get. He was tiny for a fourteen-year-old, scrawnier than Lance had ever been and ashen-skinned. At least he’d been lucid this morning, when Lance had been on brother duty.

He hated it, sitting by doing nothing as Mateo suffered, but Lance had graduated high school last spring and hadn’t found a job yet. He’d been hoping for a scholarship to the Garrison, but of course that hadn’t come through. So now he had his days free to watch Mateo, which meant both his parents could at least work the day shift. Lance did readings in the evenings to drum up business for Hunk, and they split the profits fifty/fifty. (Personally, Lance found that ridiculous, since Lance didn’t actually earn anything, but Hunk swore up and down he’d never have sold half as many potions if Lance didn’t point people his way.)

Not that it was enough, of course. Juniberries were expensive these days, and only growing more so. The twenty or fifty or a hundred bucks Lance brought home after a night of selling his charm still wasn’t enough to buy Mateo’s medicine.

The Turn had caused Mateo’s illness, changing the mark on his hand from Blessing to curse. Lance’s family wasn’t the only one affected, of course, but the fact that his brother had gone from the star of his eighth grade soccer team to a ghost who only rarely had the energy to leave his room—that made the whole thing personal.

This had all been so much easier when he’d been able to blame the faceless strangers of the Persephone Circle.

Lance stayed with Mateo for just a few minutes before heading out into the kitchen for a late dinner. He’d been too nervous to eat before heading over to Keith and Pidge’s apartment, and he didn’t have much more of an appetite now—so the sight of Luz seated at the dining room table easily usurped his half-hearted quest for food.

Though only twelve years old, Luz was well on her way to becoming the best in the family at tarot readings. She had a simple spread laid out before her on the table and was squinting at the cards, her brow furrowed like she was in the middle of open heart surgery.

Lance tossed his jacket on the counter and went to peer over his sister’s shoulder. She still used the Rider Waite deck she’d received for her tenth birthday, though Lance had heard her talking to their mother lately about finding a new deck. _H_ _er_ deck, she said.

“Whatcha looking for, squirt?” Lance asked, crossing his arms on Luz’s head.

She looked up at him, frowning, and blew a strand of long, straight brown hair out of her eyes. “Peace and quiet.”

Lance laughed. “You! Little Princess Screams-a-lot? That’s the best joke you’ve ever told.”

Luz elbowed him in the ribs, but she was smiling, which was something. She’d become far too serious since everything went to hell.

Lance glanced down at the cards—a simple three-card spread. Considering it was past nine o’clock, that wasn’t too surprising. Luz had school tomorrow, and one of their parents would be down any minute now to shuttle her off to bed. She must have had a lot of homework tonight if she hadn’t had time for a reading before now.

Studying the cards, Lance tried to dredge up what little his family had managed to hammer home about tarot cards and their meanings. Lance had never had much skill with tarot; he didn’t have the patience for it, and he’d never been able to remember all the cards and what they signified. But his dad had some talent, and his dad’s mom, and his cousin Sebastian. His Aunt Carmen was licensed, and planning on taking Luz as an official apprentice as soon as she turned fifteen.

Somewhere along the line, some small bits of trivia had wormed their way into Lance’s head, so he could at least name the cards lying before Luz.

On the left was the Nine of Swords, which showed an old man sitting up in bed, his hands over his face like he’d just had a nightmare. Nine swords hung on the wall behind him.

Next to this was the Five of Pentacles, which showed a pair of beggars wandering past a stained glass window, where the five pentacles were arranged like leaves on a tree.

On the right was the Knight of Cups, the knight on his white horse prancing toward a river, a golden chalice in his hand.

Lance tried not to react to the intense stare Luz was giving him. She knew, like Lance did, like the entire family did, that the Knight of Cups was Lance’s card.

“You know, the Knight of Cups can also mean romance,” Lance said lamely, and cocked his head to the side as he strained to remember what he’d been taught. “Let's see... You’ve been having nightmares because you think you’re going to die old and alone, but you’re about to meet your knight in shining armor.”

He looked down to see if Luz was buying it, but she just rolled her eyes. “I wasn’t asking about my _love life_ , Romeo.” She swept up the cards, then pointed at the chair across from her. “Sit.”

Lance took a step backwards. “I don’t know, Luz. It’s getting late.”

“ _Sit_ ,” she said again, shuffling the deck with quick, practiced movements. “Just a quick reading.”

Glancing over his shoulder in hopes of finding one of his parents come to save him from his sister, Lance shuffled toward the indicated seat. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Luz’s readings, or that he had anything against tarot in general. It was nearly as mundane to him as auras.

It was just that he didn’t like being on the receiving end of supernatural insight. All well and good to be the one doing the reading—to be able to dull his own aura so strangers couldn’t read him.

It was much harder to guard against tarot, once you’d agreed to do the reading.

But Luz was insistent, and Lance was a complete pushover when it came to his siblings, and within a minute he found himself cutting the deck for Luz.

“I’ll keep it simple,” she said, drumming her fingers on the back of the top card. “It’s too late for anything big, anyway.”

“Three cards,” Lance said, because he knew Luz, and he knew that to her _simple_ could mean ten cards, or twenty.

She scowled at him, but didn’t argue. “Think of a person.”

Keith’s face flashed through Lance’s head, dark and pinched and surrounded by an oily aura cut through with an old white scar.

Lance scowled, but before he could think of someone— _anyone—_ else, Luz had laid her first card. She’d been taking cues from their father, who said that flash readings were best for people like Lance. Normally, it was best to really concentrate on whatever you wanted to ask, but Lance’s mind had a tendency to wander. It was part of why he was so bad at tarot. But with rapid-fire prompts to trigger a brief, intense focus, Luz could get just as accurate a reading without the need for sustained focus.

The card she’d laid on the table showed an old man in a robe carrying a staff in one hand and a lantern in the other, but the card was upside down. That changed the meaning, Lance knew, though he couldn’t remember exactly how.

It was the Hermit, one of the major arcana cards, which were supposed to only show up for life-changing sorts of things. That might have made Lance nervous, except that he refused to let it, and chose to focus instead on the fact that Keith’s card was the _Hermit._

He snorted, but Luz smacked him on the head with her deck. “Stop.”

Pouting, Lance rubbed his forehead. “What? It’s funny.”

“No it’s not. This person is hurting and lonely and they need help.” She paused, narrowing her eyes at him. “They need _you._ ”

“Excuse me?” Lance scoffed, remembering Keith’s face as he’d chased Lance and Hunk out of the apartment. “I think your inner eye needs glasses, Luz. He doesn’t--”

Luz flipped over her deck, slamming it down on the table hard enough to rattle the empty water glass at the far end. There on the bottom of the deck was the Knight of Cups. Lance’s card. Which had been right next to the Hermit until Lance cut the deck at that exact spot.

“He. Needs. You,” Luz said. Then she flipped her deck back over and went on like nothing had happened. “Think of a problem.”

Lance thought of Allura. Nothing like an illegally-summoned demon sitting in a stranger’s apartment probably plotting how to kill the whole city to soothe Lance’s nerves.

Luz laid out her second card, and Lance’s heart dropped as he recognized another major arcana card. One in a reading was noteworthy. Two was bordering on portentous—and Lance didn’t need anyone else telling him he’d got himself caught up in a situation that might change his life (and not in a good way.)

The card showed an angel standing in a stream, or maybe a lake, pouring water from one cup into another. It wasn’t a card Lance had seen a lot, so it took him a few seconds to remember what it was called: Temperance.

He frowned. If this was some passive-aggressive way for the fates to tell him he shouldn’t have gotten greedy and agreed to summon a demon…

“It wasn’t an accident,” Luz said. Lance jumped and looked up at her, only to find her gaze distant. She was frowning, like she wasn’t entirely sure why she’d said that—which might have worried Lance, except he knew too well how disorienting an unconscious reading could be.

And how accurate they usually were.

Luz’s eyes cleared. “I don’t know what happened, or… what you _think_ happened, but it happened for a reason. Someone _made_ it happen.”

Lance shivered, remembering the utter incomprehension in Keith’s aura when Allura had first appeared. He’d expected Zarkon—they all had—and it was only natural to assume some mistake in the ritual had crossed the wires somehow.

He wondered now whether Zarkon had somehow redirected the summoning. Lance had never heard of a demon with that kind of power, but he’d also never heard of a summoning circle vanishing into thin air the way the Persephone Circle had done.

“You know what question I asked with my last spread?” Luz asked suddenly, and Lance had to blink a few times to clear his head of thoughts of Zarkon.

“What did you ask?”

“If there was a way for me to help Mateo.”

Lance’s heart clenched, and he opened his mouth to say something—to comfort Luz, to promise her she didn’t have to worry about it, that Lance and their parents would figure it out.

Luz leaned halfway across the table to press a finger to his lips. “It said there wasn’t anything I could do except stay positive,” she said, staring him straight in the eye. “It also said _you_ were doing something I didn’t know about that might help.”

Lance’s mind went at once to his deal with Pidge and Keith—summoning Zarkon in exchange for help collecting juniberries for Mateo. His eyes widened, and Luz smiled deviously as she flipped over the third and final card.

_Death._

Lance’s heart hit the floor. He stared numbly at the image—a skeleton in knight’s armor on a white horse standing over a dead king. A priest, a child, and a noblewoman kneeling before him. The rising sun in the background. And in Death’s hand, a black banner bearing the image of a white rose.

Why would Death show up when he was thinking about Mateo?

“Stop panicking,” Luz said.

Lance gaped at her, floundering for words. “Stop—Luz! What the hell--heck! What the heck? That’s freaking _Death!_ ”

She flicked his nose. “You really are terrible at this, aren’t you? The Death card doesn’t always mean actual death.” She sat back, all smug and self-satisfied as Lance rubbed his nose, trying to slow his racing heart.

Luz was right—as soon as she’d said it, Lance remembered one of Aunt Carmen’s lessons. _Death is about rebirth_ , or something like that. The Death card could represent endings, or beginnings, or transitions, or…

Lance blew out a long breath. Luz was the one with the gift for this, not Lance. “What does it mean?”

“It means whatever it was you’re thinking about doing is going to change things. Like, _really_ change them.”

“For Mateo?” Lance asked.

Luz stared down at her spread, brow furrowed. Three major arcana cards stared back at her, deceptively innocent. Lance had never seen a spread that was made up of only major arcana, except when someone asked for that specifically. He didn’t have the gift of premonition, but he swore he felt a storm gathering on the horizon. Keith, Allura, Mateo…

“I think it’s about more than just Mateo,” Luz said at length. She looked up at Lance, her face too serious for any twelve-year-old, then pointed without looking to the white rose on Death’s banner. “But if you’re looking for juniberries, I think you might be on the right track.”

* * *

An hour later, Lance lay awake in bed, trying to get Luz’s reading out of his head. Keith needed him, Allura had been sent here on purpose, and Lance might actually save Mateo if he could figure out how to put up with them and not land himself in jail.

He remembered what Hunk had told him when they were debating whether or not to actually show up at Keith and Pidge’s place. _We don’t know enough to summon a demon ourselves. Even if we could, do you think we’d actually convince it to give us juniberries? But if we help these people, maybe they’ll help us._

It was absurd. Absolutely ridiculous. Breaking the law, making nice with one demon while hunting down another, probably less friendly demon? All for a handful of flowers?

But it was Mateo, and after all Pidge _had_ promised juniberries in exchange for help with today’s summoning. Even if it had gone wrong, and they’d summoned Allura instead of Zarkon, Lance and Hunk had held up their end of the deal.

Tomorrow, he intended to collect his payment.


	3. Summoning Sickness

> _Most demons experience a period of summoning sickness after the ritual takes hold, though powerful individuals may not be as strongly affected. Symptoms include confusion, dizziness, weakened sorcery, and mild to moderate amnesia. Physical and magical effects rarely last beyond the first hour, but amnesia seems to persist longer. Some theorize this is an act of deception on the part of the demons, but others believe the transition to our plane and the summoning ritual itself may interfere with demons’ recall._

\--From the Garrison School of Spellcraft’s _Handbook of Demonology,_ Chapter 3: Summoning Sickness

* * *

“Is this really what humans consider magic?”

Pidge looked up from the talisman she was working on. The not-a-demon, Allura, was seated primly on the lumpy couch, which had a bath towel spread across a massive tear in one of the cushions and an old coffee stain on one arm. Looking at the princess, though, it might as well have been a throne. Allura’s spine was perfectly straight, her ankles crossed, her fingers splayed out delicately as she flipped through one of Pidge’s spell books.

“It _is_ magic,” Pidge said.

Allura very nearly snorted, but the sound still somehow seemed regal. “ _Hardly_. It’s no wonder your kind needs to kidnap us to get anything done.”

“Kidnap!”

Allura looked up, the pink markings beneath her eyes standing out pearly-bright against her dark skin. “You reach into our world and pluck us out, then hold us hostage here until we’ve done what you want. It’s not exactly a social call.”

Pidge spluttered, trying to find a rebuttal. Demonology was—it was an ancient art, and well-respected. Oh, sure, there had been some dark stories from the middle ages. Murders and betrayals and something like a war that had ended with a centuries-long ban on summoning. But since the art was rediscovered in the 1890s, it had turned into a perfectly respectable trade. Civil, even. People kept records of which demons were willing to trade and which ones got pissed off at being summoned, and it wasn’t like people _deliberately_ summoned the ones who didn’t want to be summoned. That was a good way to guarantee you got a shit deal.

It was _not_ kidnapping, whatever Allura said. Most of the summonings the Persephone Circle had done didn’t even need a contract; they’d mostly just talked with the demon they summoned, trying to draw out information about Altea. Pidge had sat in on most of those rituals, would have helped if her dad didn’t think she was too young. The demons had almost all been happy to chat, and they’d left with herbs or charms that only existed on Earth. (Altea, apparently, had never bothered learning how to make talismans or potions until very recently, and the art was much less advanced there. The cost of having sorcery, Pidge supposed.)

Pidge sniffed. “It’s your own fault. Ever since the Turn we have to be extra careful so you don’t slaughter us all.”

“I would never--”

“I can bring up the news stories, if you want.” Pidge carved another line into her talisman, a little deeper than she wanted, and scowled. Setting her work down on the kitchen table, she turned her full attention on Allura. “Hundreds of people died in the days after the Turn. Thousands more were demon-touched. _Don’t_ tell me I’m being unfair here.”

Allura’s brows pinched together, and she quietly shut the book, setting it aside. “You’ve mentioned that before. The ‘Turn.’ What is it? What happened?”

“Like you don’t know.”

“I _don’t_.” Allura’s voice was so earnest, Pidge’s sharp retort fizzled out. She tried to tell herself it was an act, just like the ones she’d seen so often from the lesser demons she and Keith had summoned over the last year. They’d all claimed to not know who Zarkon was, or what had happened to the Persephone Circle, or why demons were suddenly killing people after more than a hundred years of peace.

Pidge didn’t believe them for a second.

“You know Zarkon,” Pidge said slowly, and was rewarded by a slight rise in Allura’s shoulders.

“That’s absurd,” Allura said— _clearly_ lying now, which might have been a sign she was a terrible liar (and therefore telling the truth when she claimed not to know about the Turn) or just another layer to her deception. “Just because _you_ can’t tell the difference between Alteans and Galra doesn’t mean we’re some sort of hive mind.”

Pidge pulled her feet up onto her chair, resting her chin on her knees. “Oh, I can tell the difference between you just fine. Tattooed elves and purple Sasquatches are _kinda_ hard to mix up.”

“And yet you lump us together.”

Shrugging, Pidge wrapped her arms around her ankles. “It’s easier to say ‘demon’ than ‘Galra and/or Altean.’ There’s never been any difference in the way you’re summoned or how you go about making bargains.”

Not until the Turn, anyway. Pidge had read her dad’s notes more than once since he disappeared. One of the many things he wanted to know, one of the Persephone Circle’s many areas of research, was the difference between the two races of demons. So Pidge knew they had different magical strengths, they left different marks behind where their sorcery took root… but they lived side by side, they exchanged information, they could generally all accomplish the same things with their respective magics.

It was more like the difference between a psychic who used tarot and one who had visions, not this massive cultural chasm Allura seemed to see.

“Something happened a year ago, didn’t it?” Pidge asked. “Something on Altea.”

Allura arched an eyebrow. “I don’t see how it’s any of _your_ business if it did.”

“Give it up, Pidge,” Keith said, leaning against the bathroom door as he toweled his hair dry. He wore loose black sweat pants and a black tee-shirt. Allura turned toward his voice, only to hesitate, her eyes following his right arm as he draped his towel over the door.

“That scar…”

Keith stiffened, eyes narrowing as he tucked his right arm against his chest, his fingers tangling in the silver chain around his neck. His eyes locked with Pidge’s for an instant before Keith forced a semblance of calm and headed for his bedroom.

His voice drifted out to the living room. “I don’t know why you’re still talking to her. She’s not going to help us any more than she has to.”

“And whose fault is _that_?” Allura demanded, snatching back the spell book she’d set aside. “You’ve given me absolutely no reason to help you.”

Keith scoffed loudly as he emerged, now wearing a red hoodie. “You want to get home, don’t you?”

“Obviously. Sadly, neither of you know how to get me there.”

Pidge glanced at Keith, blowing out a long breath. She had them there. “No,” Pidge said reluctantly. “We don’t. That’s why we need to know as much as possible about your world. About what happened a year ago. About how you ended up here when we didn’t summon you.”

For a long moment, Allura went on sulking, her eyes steady on the book in her lap. She wasn’t reading, just staring, her gaze seeming to fall a few inches beyond the page. Now that she wasn’t tossing lightning at them or threatening to have them all thrown into the void for imprisoning her, she seemed almost… _human._

Pissy, prissy, pointy-eared human, but still human. Still small and scared and confused. Even Pidge would have been short-tempered if she’d been stuck in another world with a couple of strangers and had to sleep on a lumpy couch.

Finally Allura sighed, sinking back against the limp couch cushions, her fine silk dress bunching up around her shoulders. “I don’t know how I came here.”

Keith had gone to the fridge to check the state of their assorted leftovers, but he straightened at Allura’s words, eyebrow twitching. “You don’t _know_?”

Allura raised her chin. “Have _you_ ever been ripped out of your plane of existence? It’s not exactly an afternoon stroll.”

“You’ve had all night to recover,” Keith pointed out. “Shouldn’t you be over your summoning sickness by now?”

Allura shrugged helplessly and drummed her fingers on the open spellbook. “Things are different since...”

She trailed off, lips pursing. Pidge almost felt bad for her—she didn’t seem that much older than Keith, and she’d been caught by a rogue ritual, ripped away from her home, told there was no way for her to go back.

 _She’s a demon, Pidge. She’s just sad she can’t kill you without destroying herself._ Probably she was trying to gauge the strength of Pidge’s contract talisman. Probably she was hoping a homemade talisman would be weaker than what the Garrison used. If so, she was in for a big letdown. Pidge didn’t half-ass her talismans. Especially when it was a matter of survival.

“Things are different since... what?” Keith asked. “Since the Turn?”

“So it would seem.” Allura left it at that, and Pidge could only speculate on what changes the Turn had wrought on Altea. Some of the effects could be seen on Earth—the violent attacks, the failure of Blessings, the way summonings failed to take root even more often than they ended in tragedy. The Garrison tried to keep that last quiet, but enough people still did their own rituals that word had gotten out, as had the curious trend for Altean summonings to fail more often than did Galra summonings.

Everyone had their own theory for what had happen. The most popular, in many circles, was that Galra and Alteans were actually two forms of the same species, and that the Turn had converted Alteans into their Galra forms, which (supposedly) were more violent and less trustworthy.

That theory didn’t track with Pidge. The Galra hadn’t been violent before last year. Maybe there were more Galra than Alteans on the list of dangerous demons that no one was supposed to summon, but that list was barely a dozen names long.

No, Pidge had another theory.

“There was a war,” Pidge said slowly, watching Allura. “Wasn’t there?”

Allura tensed.

“It makes sense. It would explain the failed summonings, the corrupted Blessings. If those demons were killed--”

“We’re done talking about this,” Allura said, standing suddenly. “I trust you won’t object to me using your shower?”

Not waiting for an answer, Allura headed for the bathroom, her steps swift and long. She was angry again, and Pidge instinctively reached for the contract talisman in her pocket as Allura passed. The princess spared Pidge a condescending look, not slowing, and Pidge felt the heat rush into her cheeks. Allura hadn’t so much as attempted to hurt either of them since the contract; Pidge was just being paranoid.

Losing half her family would do that.

Allura was at the bathroom door when there was a sudden, violent pounding on the front door. Pidge jumped so high she almost fell out of her chair, and Keith was clutching his silver dagger as he spun toward the door. Allura froze in the hallway, eyes wide.

Pidge swore, scrambling to her feet and shoving Allura into the bathroom. “Stay there,” she hissed. “Don’t come out.”

She realized suddenly that the contract hadn’t mentioned anything about Allura not getting Pidge and Keith arrested, but it was far too late to do anything about that. She’d just have to hope Allura understood that she’d lose any chance of getting back to Altea if she was discovered. The Garrison wasn’t in the business of making nice with demons these days.

The bathroom door safely shut, Pidge turned and dashed for the front door, trying excuses on for size before she even opened it.

Hunk and Lance stood on the landing outside, Lance tapping his foot, his arms crossed, Hunk fidgeting nervously behind him. Pidge sagged against the door, relief escaping her in a rush of air. It wasn’t the Garrison. They weren’t under arrest for their illegal summoning. Yet.

Keith stepped up behind Pidge, tensing at the sight of their guests. “What are _you_ doing here?”

“You promised me juniberries,” Lance said, jaw jutting out stubbornly. “I’m not leaving until I get them.”

“Juniberries?”

Pidge jumped half out of her skin at Allura’s voice, close behind the cluster of people at the door. Glancing frantically around the stairwell for any prying eyes, Pidge whirled and shoved Allura back into the apartment. “What happened to _stay out of sight?_ ”

Allura put her hands on her hips and planted her feet, easily resisting Pidge’s attempt to move her. “I recognized the Quintessence of your fellow summoners,” she said. “They aren’t a threat.”

Pidge gave one last, futile shove, then turned pleadingly toward Keith. “Can we _please_ not have this conversation where the whole apartment complex can hear?”

“Fine by me,” Lance said, and stepped into the apartment, Hunk close behind. Keith bristled, but shut the door behind them. “We made a deal. Me and Hunk help you out with your summoning, you help us get juniberries. So pony up.”

“I know where to find juniberries,” Allura said, smiling sweetly. She sidled up to Lance, eyes flashing. “Tell you what—Lance, was it? You convince these two to release me from our contract, and I’ll get you all the juniberries you want.”

Pidge grabbed Lance’s arm and yanked him away from Allura. “You can’t even get back to Altea right now.”

The sweet smile vanished in an instant. “And whose fault is that?” Allura asked.

Lance gave Allura a dopey smile, his cheeks faintly pink, and Pidge shook him. “Don’t let her trick you, Lance.”

He blinked a few times, then turned his gaze on Pidge. His eyes were far sharper now, searching in a way that made Pidge want to shove him away. “Does that mean _you’re_ gonna help me?”

“Considering your dumbass circles ruined the ritual in the first place?” Keith asked. “No way.”

Hunk straightened up, suddenly looking far less like the ineffective moral support Pidge had assumed he was. “Hey, I told you yesterday. The theory is sound.”

Pidge almost stayed quiet. _Almost._ Too many things had already gone wrong in a search that had started out hopeless, and the last thing she wanted was to invite Hunk and Lance back in to continue throwing Pidge’s plans into disarray.

But she’d spent two hours last night studying the chalk circles on the kitchen floor, trying to figure out how they’d sent the ritual so far down the wrong track. Two hours on hands and knees, another three poring over all of the theory books and her dad’s research notes, and in the end she’d come up with only one possible answer.

“Hunk’s right, Keith,” Pidge said, feeling like the words were being torn from her mouth. “They have iron dust in their chalk, and the interior shapes anchor the circle just as well as a nail or amulet at the nodes. Whatever swapped Zarkon for Allura, it had nothing to do with their technique.”

Lance flung his hands out toward Pidge. “See? Told you we knew what we were doing. So… juniberries?” Lance cradled his chin in the space between thumb and forefinger, grinning. “I should warn you, I’ve been told I can be very annoying when I want to.”

Keith stared blandly at him, arms crossed. “I never would have guessed.”

Lance’s expression soured. “If you’re gonna be like that, maybe I _will_ help Allura.”

Allura smiled, clasping her hands to her chest, and Lance winked at her. Pidge was pretty sure Allura had to suppress a grimace, but she held her expression until Lance looked away.

Groaning, Pidge turned and stalked into the kitchen. She and Keith hadn’t bothered to put away the box of summoning supplies after last night’s disaster, and traces of the ink they’d used to draw the pentacle remained on the floor. Pidge hastily traced over this remnant, smacked her prefab circle down at the primary vertex, and knelt in the center.

She turned and glared at the stunned knot of people by the door. “This is the only time I’m going to make this offer, Lance, so you’d damn well get over here quick.”

He straightened up, beamed at Pidge, and scurried over. The others didn’t see him breathe a sigh of relief; Pidge probably wouldn’t have, either, except that he’d claimed the third point, almost directly across from Pidge.

She remembered the whispers she’d stumbled across while looking into Lance and Hunk’s credentials, the ghost-trails that said they would always trade goods and services for juniberries instead of cash. Before, Pidge had seen a weakness to exploit.

Now all she saw was someone as desperate as her.

Keith grumbled as he joined the circle with Hunk, but one look at Pidge quieted him. He frowned, and Pidge shook her head. _I’ll explain later._ She wasn’t sure her meaning came across, but Keith knew her well enough to follow her lead, and he made no further protests as the four of them constructed their anchoring circles.

Allura hovered just outside their circle, watching curiously. Her gaze prickled along the back of Pidge’s neck, an uncomfortable reminder that they had a potential enemy in the room with them.

Pidge turned, arching an eyebrow at Allura. “Is something wrong?”

“No, no, nothing.” Allura tipped her head to the side, wiggling her fingers at the circle. “I’ve never seen it from this side.”

“Uh-huh...” Pidge shook her head and turned back to the ritual. She had her father’s notebook beside her and flipped through to a page near the back where her father had listed every demon he’d summoned with notes about how easy they were to work with. She ran her finger down the list until she found one marked with a star—one of her dad’s favorite contacts.

_Thace._

Pidge had researched all the starred names, with mixed results. Many of them—the Alteans—were now listed as unresponsive (an unofficial category for demons who had failed to answer summons since the Turn.) The Galra, by and large, weren’t listed in official records at all.

The four of them worked quickly, with none of the easy banter common to the many, many, _many_ rituals Keith and Pidge had performed together. Once the circles were drawn and the wards in place, Pidge recited the spell, pricked her thumb, and pressed it to the juncture between her circle and the pentacle.

Wind stirred, but it was sluggish, and only a tiny fractal of ice formed at the center of the pentacle. For an instant the room seemed to hold its breath, energies stalling. Then the magic dissipated, the candles went dark, and Pidge was left kneeling beside an empty circle.

For a moment, no one spoke. No one even moved. Lance stared at the empty circle, utterly at a loss for words, eyes wide, jaw slack. In a flash, his expression shut down, and he rounded on Keith. “What gives?” he demanded.

Keith stiffened. “You tell me! We never had problems with rituals until _you two_ showed up.”

That wasn’t entirely true, but Pidge didn’t bother contradicting him. She was too busy leaning forward to peer at the summoning circle. If not for yesterday’s demon surprise, Pidge would be perfectly willing to chalk this up to just another unresponsive demon, but two failed summonings in a row was a bad sign. Had they gotten a bad batch of ink? Had they finally performed so many summonings in this apartment that the residual energy had seeped into the linoleum to mess up their new circles?

Pidge shook her head. _Start simple._ “Shut up, Lance,” she said, distracted. She wasn’t honestly sure Lance had even said anything, but the way he was scowling at Keith said it was about to come to blows, and Pidge needed them all to focus. “We’re trying another summoning.”

She ran her finger down the list of names until she found another starred one—Kolivan, a Galra she and Keith had summoned just a few weeks ago. He hadn’t exactly been _talkative_ , but he hadn’t been hostile, and evidently Pidge’s dad had found him helpful enough to warrant a star.

This ritual went no better than the last, and when it ended, Lance looked close to breaking. Keith didn’t have to say anything, just draw in a frustrated breath, and Lance rounded on him.

“Whatever you’re going to say, _don’t_ ,” Lance hissed.

Keith narrowed his eyes. “Just as long as you don’t try to pin your mistakes on me again.”

“ _My_ mistakes?” A laugh bubbled out of Lance, shrill and sharp. Hunk reached out to grasp Lance’s wrist.

“Lance…”

Lance shrugged him off. “My brother’s _life_ is riding on this ritual, Keith, I sure as _fuck_ am not the one screwing around here.”

Pidge’s breath seized in her chest. A few feet away, Keith seemed to melt, his face flashing to shock, then pain. He opened his mouth, and Lance recoiled. Pidge had to wonder what he’d seen in Keith’s aura, what it was that made the shutters slam closed behind his eyes.

“Your brother?” Pidge asked in a small voice. She should have realized. Why else would Lance be so desperate to get his hands on juniberries, if not because someone he cared about was sick? Some part of her had known it all along, but she hadn’t _known_. It had just been one more fact to tuck away, one more string she could tug to convince Lance to help them summon Zarkon.

She thought of Matt, and felt sick.

“What happened?”

Lance crossed his arms, staring stubbornly at the center of the pentacle. Hunk glanced at him, hesitated, then closed his eyes and plunged ahead. “Mateo—that’s Lance’s brother—he had a Blessing. His grandma had helped out this de--” He paused, glancing nervously at Allura, who still hovered by the fridge, watching the proceedings with a small frown. “An Altean. I don’t know all of it, not really, but I guess the Altean was impressed, because she offered Lance’s grandma a Blessing.

“This was only, what? Ten years ago? Lance’s grandma was already in her sixties. She said, well, what am _I_ gonna do with a Blessing? Give it to my grandson instead.”

“And then the Persephone Circle went and triggered the Turn,” Lance said, his voice dripping with venom. He stared at Keith like he was _hoping_ for a fight, but his breath was rapid and shallow, and his hands shook. “My brother’s only _fourteen_ , and he hasn’t been to school in a year. He’s sick all the time, he barely eats, and all the doctors have to say is it’s a magical ailment. Conventional medicine won’t help. The whole family’s pitched in to buy the juniberries he needs, but it’s not enough anymore. No one _has_ juniberries anymore. _That’s_ why we taught ourselves summoning. _That’s_ why we agreed to help you summon your stupid homicidal demon.”

Pidge closed her eyes. “Our families didn’t _trigger_ the Turn,” she said weakly. It felt like she was talking just to fill the air. She didn’t know what else to say. She’d lost Matt and her dad, but at least she didn’t have to sit by and watch them waste away.

“So _you_ say.”

Hunk squeezed Lance’s wrist again, dragging him away from the building argument. He leaned over to whisper something in Lance’s ear, and Lance shuddered, running shaking hands down his face.

“Pidge is right.”

Allura’s voice had an odd, dazed quality to it, and she hardly seemed to notice when all four humans turned toward her.

“What?” Pidge asked.

Allura stared at her, lips pursed, then breathed out a sigh. “There’s a war happening on Altea. As near as I can tell, it started at the same time as what you call the Turn. My people are dying— _that’s_ why the Blessings are falling apart. They’re connected to our Quintessence. When we die, it severs the link.” She paused. For a moment it seemed she wanted to say something more, but then she merely shook her head.

Pidge swore. “That would explain why demons suddenly aren’t answering summons, I guess.”

Lance stared around the circle in horror. “So… that’s it? My brother’s going to die?”

There was a moment of silence, then Keith stood, snatched the notebook from the floor beside Pidge, and shoved it at Allura. “Do you recognize any of these names? Are any of them still alive?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Allura took the notebook and scanned the list of names. Her frown deepened by the second. “No,” she said at last. “I’m sorry, I don’t know any of these people.”

“Of course.” Keith huffed and took the book back. “I guess we’re going to have to try them all, then.”

Lance gave a start, staring up at Keith, who studiously ignored the wide eyes and dropped jaw.

“Wait,” Allura said as Keith rejoined the circle. Pidge turned toward her, and she drew herself up, folding her hands at her waist. “Coran.”

“What?” Pidge asked.

“Summon Coran. I was with him just before you summoned me. Or… at least, I think I was. Unless something dire has happened since yesterday, he should still be alive.”

Pidge exchanged looks with Keith, silently asking him if they could trust Allura. He shrugged, and Pidge sighed. It wasn’t as though they had a lot of options right now.

So they refocused, rechecked their wards, and tried one last summoning. This time, the air didn’t even stir. Pidge’s eyes wandered to the edges of the room, where Allura stood with her hand over her mouth, eyes wide and wet.

Well, shit.

* * *

“It’s not just us,” Pidge said, stunned. She had her computer out, and she’d claimed one corner of the couch, Hunk and Lance squeezed in next to her. An impatient glare kept them from crawling on top of her, but they were still uncomfortably close. Allura took the folding canvas chair across from them, struggling to look dignified as her butt tried to slide backward in the hammock seat.

Keith paced behind the couch, but at Pidge’s declaration, he stopped, crossing his arms on the backrest and peering over Pidge’s shoulder.

The news sites were all crawling with early reports: _Garrison spokesman announces total loss of contact with demonic realm._ There weren’t many details—this was the Garrison, after all, and they didn’t like talking about demons since the Turn—but what little Pidge had found was troubling.

“The forums all say the same thing,” she said, switching to a different tab. “Summonings aren’t working. For anyone.”

“What?” Lance yelped. “Since when?”

Pidge grimaced. “About five-thirty yesterday?”

Hunk’s eyes widened. “But that’s…”

“Pretty much exactly when we summoned Allura,” Keith said, frowning at the princess across the room. “You think things going haywire might be what got our lines crossed?”

“Oh!”

Lance flushed as four pairs of eyes turned his way, and he shrank back toward the far arm of the couch.

“I, uh, might have forgotten to mention something,” Lance said. “My sister did a reading yesterday. Tarot,” he clarified, trying not to make it obvious he was staring at Keith. “She said that someone sent Allura. Deliberately.”

Pidge raised an eyebrow at Allura. “Is that true?”

Allura frowned. “I--I'm not sure. I’m sorry, it’s all still fuzzy.”

Something about that rang false to Pidge’s ears, but she was tired of pestering Allura for answers. Even if she decided to be helpful for a change, there was no guarantee she would speak the truth. Besides, Pidge had an idea she wanted to try.

“My dad—and Matt and Shiro—they were working on something,” she said, glancing at Keith for approval before she went on. “Dad’s notes call it a reverse summoning. They wanted to know if it was possible to send something to Altea. Or some _one_.”

Hunk gaped at her. “Wait. You don’t mean…? You think that’s what happened? Why they disappeared? They…”

“Ended up in the demon world?” Keith asked. “Yes.”

“We can’t be sure,” Pidge said, frowning at Keith. The possibility that the Persephone Circle had ended up on Altea was the only thing that had kept them going this last year, but it was just that—a possibility. One that grew thinner with each passing day and every summoning that turned up another demon who hadn’t heard anything about humans appearing on Altea.

The ritual wasn’t even complete—not in the notes Pidge had, anyway. She’d wondered more than once whether the Garrison had confiscated the final set of instructions, or whether her dad had never figured out how to cross that final gap from _looking_ to _traveling_. Or whether she was completely off track and the Persephone Circle hadn’t been probing the higher planes at all.

But she’d been piecing it together since the disappearance. She was close now, so close. Maybe if she could pick Hunk’s brain, bring in some of the anchoring techniques he and Lance used…

She straightened up, staring at Lance and Hunk, and then at Allura. This might mean more to her than to any of the rest of them. “I don’t know if this will work, but there’s a chance we might be able to use my dad’s notes to force our way to Altea.”

* * *

Shiro knelt on bare stone, hands on his knees, an array of tarot cards spread out around him. Fatigue seemed to drag him down, clouded his mind. He’d tried more than one reading since he’d finished making this deck, but none had worked any more than this one.

He was just so _tired_. There was no time to rest, no breaks between battles. He needed answers—needed to find Matt and Sam, _somehow—_ but something about Altea seemed to dull his intuition. Maybe it was Zarkon’s influence.

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

Shiro sat up straighter at the voice behind him, but he didn’t take his eyes off his cards. Twenty-three cards lay before him, half of them from the major arcana. He wasn’t even surprised anymore. He’d long since realized he was in the middle of something that might shake the very foundations of both realms.

As with his last few spreads, the Tower sat dead center, a symbol of upheaval or revelation. Five familiar cards surrounded this: the Knight of Cups; the Page of Swords; the Queen of Pentacles; the Chariot; and the Hermit, inverted.

_Keith._

“No,” Shiro said, heaving a sigh as he stared at his spread. “All I have are more questions.” What was Keith doing? What upheaval was he headed toward? (Let it be a revelation, and not disaster.) Who were the people gathered around him?

That was the one thing Shiro knew for sure. Those five cards, the ones he kept seeing with each spread, were people. Keith, certainly, though the fact that his card was inverted made Shiro nervous. The Hermit was a close resonance to Keith’s spirit—private, introverted, relying on his own instincts and on the wisdom granted him through his visions. But when the Hermit was inverted it meant privacy had become isolation, it meant Keith wasn’t trusting his instincts so much as simply refusing to listen to anyone else.

Shiro thought the Page of Swords might be Pidge Holt, curious and passionate. As to the others…

The man—Galra—behind him grunted, shifting as he scanned the terrain around them. “We have wasted enough time here. We must move on.”

Shiro wanted to argue, but he knew he wasn’t going to learn anything more from this spread. Maybe if he ever managed to get a full night’s sleep. Maybe if worry for Sam and Matt, and the memories of his time in Zarkon’s prisons, ever faded from his mind.

He gathered his cards swiftly and tucked the tattered, handmade deck in his pocket, then stood and turned to face his companion.

“All right, Ulaz,” he said. “Let’s go.”


	4. Altea

> _No human has ever seen Altea, the realm of demons. What we know comes from the demons themselves, and is muddied by the effects of the summoning sickness. We know demons congregate in cities, much as humans do, and have at least a rudimentary government. Many demons have mentioned their king, a man named Alfor, though King Alfor himself seems immune to summoning rituals: perhaps the result of particularly strong sorcery._
> 
> _Curiously, while demons and objects from Altea are both able to cross freely to Earth, only inanimate Earth objects seem to be able to cross to Altea. Many researchers have attempted to enter Altea, only to find their way barred as if by a physical force. It has been suggested that psychics may hold the key to interplanar travel, as most forms of the Sight seem inexorably linked with the higher planes._

\--From the Garrison School of Spellcraft’s _Handbook of Demonology,_ Chapter 4: “Altea.”

* * *

“Okay, but are you _sure_ we want to do this?” Hunk asked, his pulse racing at the thought of it. Of going to Altea, of using the same spell the Persephone Circle had used the day of the Turn. No— _worse_. Pidge didn’t _have_ that spell, just early drafts and research notes and something she called a scouting ritual. She claimed it was perfectly safe, that she’d checked it out and everything should work the way her father had intended it to, but how could she be sure?

How could any of them be sure that the spell, even if correct and complete, was safe to use?

Pidge sighed, her head lolling back. “It’s _fine_ , Hunk. It’s not like we’re opening a gateway or anything. This is more of a… test run. Dad’s notes say he used this spell plenty of times, and never had any problems with it.”

“But it’s the same basic thing as the reverse summoning that made them disappear,” Lance said. “Right?”

Pidge pursed her lips. “That spell expands on the same framework used in this one, yes. That’s the point—if _this_ works, then the reverse summoning will probably work, too—if we can finish the spell.”

Hunk shook his head. “But we already know summonings aren’t working,” he said, as much to calm himself as to try to talk Pidge out of this plan of hers. It _wouldn’t_ work, so there was nothing to worry about. But if there was nothing to worry about, why was he so desperate to make sure they didn’t even try?

“This ritual works differently,” Pidge said. “Everyone else who’s tried to go to Altea based their rituals on the summoning ritual—literally reversing the flow of energy to summon yourself into Altea. Which is, frankly, ridiculous. If you could summon yourself _to_ another place, then demons would be able to come here all on their own.”

Allura’s mouth turned down into a frown, not that Pidge noticed. “Then how is _this_ spell supposed to work?” she asked.

“He based it on psychic abilities,” Pidge said. “Shiro was skilled with tarot, and Matt was a dreamer. Dad studied their skills and found out that psychics create a kind of link to Altea. This spell--” She tapped the page with the instructions for the scouting ritual “--is recreating that link. Specifically _Matt’s_ link. It’ll send our consciousness to Altea, but it’ll basically be a waking dream. The actual reverse summoning layers a physical spell over the top so that our bodies get carried along. In theory.”

“The _point_ ,” Keith said, standing against the wall with his arms crossed, “is that the scouting spell is safe. It’s not what took the Persephone Circle.”

Lance snorted. “I suppose your _vision_ told you that?”

Keith’s fingers tightened on the sleeves of his jacket. “The spell they used was burned into my floorboards,” he growled. “I saw it every day until I moved in here with Pidge. It wasn’t the scouting ritual.”

Lance fell silent, dropping his gaze. Keith glared at him a moment longer, until he was certain Lance was done, then went back to staring at the pentacle on the floor.

Hunk glanced around, waiting for someone to ask the obvious question. When no one did, Hunk cleared his throat. “So… what spell _was_ it? The reverse summoning?”

“I don’t know,” Keith said. “We don’t have a diagram of the completed reverse summoning circle to compare it to. But it wasn’t anything I’d ever seen before. Nothing like any ritual we can find in the literature.”

“But you think it was the reverse summoning,” Hunk said.

“Yes,” said Keith.

Pidge hesitated.

Lance arched an eyebrow. “You don’t think so?” He held up a hand as Pidge opened her mouth. “Don't even bother. Auras.”

Muttering under her breath, Pidge shot a look at Keith. “I’ve been trying to recreate the reverse summoning from my dad’s notes,” she said. “And I’ve seen Keith’s sketch of the circle in his old apartment. I don’t think they’re related.”

“Then… what were they doing when they disappeared?” Hunk asked.

“I don’t know.” Pidge sighed, then squared her shoulders. “So are we doing this or not?”

Hunk hesitated. It still seemed risky. Really risky, considering all the weird stuff that had been happening lately. Summonings failing all over the world. Allura getting summoned in Zarkon’s place. Even if the scouting ritual was safe in and of itself, there was no telling whether the same was true with magic going haywire.

“Three days,” he said, glancing from Pidge to Keith. “If you give me three days, I can brew up some potions that should help protect us from any… unexpected hiccups. Not in your dad’s spell,” he added quickly, when Pidge’s face turned defensive. “I mean in case whoever sent Allura here decides to do something while we’re scouting.”

It looked like the possibility had never occurred to Pidge—or to Keith, for that matter. Both blinked at him, their spines a little stiffer than they’d been before.

After a moment, Pidge nodded. “Three days.”

* * *

“Pidge?”

Hunk glanced toward Lance, who frowned, pinning his cell phone between his cheek and his shoulder as he squeezed the viscous goop out of aloe leaves into a flask. It was slow work, but straight-forward, which was why Hunk had left it to Lance—he was good at a lot of things, but potioneering unfortunately wasn’t one of them.

Hunk raised his eyebrows in a silent question as he added fennel seeds to his protective potion. Lance tossed his aloe leaf aside, wiped his hand on his pant leg, and switched his phone to speaker.

“--just wondering if you know the name of the demon who gave your brother his Blessing.” said Pidge.

Lance’s body went rigid, the phone almost slipping from his hands. He spluttered for a moment, shaking his head like he thought he’d misheard.

Hunk took one look at him and jumped in. “Why? What difference does it make which demon did it?”

“Oh, hey, Hunk. Didn’t realize you were there.”

Hunk hummed, stirring the protective potion. His second cauldron—the one containing the early stages of a nullifying potion—simmered beside the first. It would take longer to finish than the protective potion, since the anise, holly, and hawthorne he’d already added would need to brew for a full day before he could add in the rest of the ingredients.

“Yeah,” he said, distracted. “Lance is keeping me company while I work on the potions. What’s this about Mateo’s Blessing?”

“Oh. Well...” Pidge made a few noncommittal noises, then sighed. “I _think_ I might be able to make a talisman that’ll help him. It’s not a cure, really, but until we figure out how to get to Altea for some juniberries...”

Lance shook himself, scattering aloe plants across the floor as he stood and started to pace. Hunk’s apartment wasn’t big, but he’d left the second bedroom empty for brewing, and Lance took full advantage of the space, idly toying with drying herbs and empty flasks and the row of plants in the window as he passed.

“There’s a charm?” he asked. His voice was almost normal—Pidge probably wouldn’t have heard the breathlessness in it—but his hands were shaking, and his eyes, when they caught Hunk’s, showed white around the irises. “I thought--”

“See, _this_ is the problem,” Pidge said, sounding annoyed. “Anyone can make talismans, so they all just _assume_ they know everything. Nobody appreciates the value of good old-fashioned experimentation.”

“ _Pidge_.”

“Sorry.” Pidge cleared her throat. “Yes. There’s a charm that can help limit the effect of a bad Blessing. I should be able to figure it out, anyway; I’ve got a few days to waste. But I need to know what I’m doing. A name, at least. The specific Blessing if you know it.”

Lance turned, his toes curling inside his socks, and shook his head. “I—I don’t know. I didn’t really pay attention back then, but—Pidge. You’re sure about this?”

There was a silence on the other end of the line, and Hunk held his breath. _Don’t taunt him,_ _Pidge. Don’t give him false hope. Not after everything else._

“I’m positive,” Pidge said, her voice giving no leeway. “It’s not the same as juniberries, it won’t counteract all the effects, but it’s better than nothing.”

Lance leaned his forehead against the wall. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’ll ask—someone. I’ll ask someone and let you know. Just a name, yeah?”

“I mean, if you know anything else, what the Blessing was meant to do, if it has a name, that sort of thing... it can’t _hurt._ But the name’s the most important part.”

“Okay. Call you back.” Lance hung up, then hesitated, staring at his phone.

Hunk watched Lance from the corner of his eye as he stirred his potion. Lance’s grandmother, the one who had originally earned the Blessing that became Mateo’s, had died a few years ago. Hunk wasn't sure who else knew all the details of what had happened.

“You gonna call your parents?” Hunk asked slowly.

Lance tapped his phone against his chin, frowning. Hunk knew what he must be thinking—Mateo’s illness, his medicine, the events that had led up to him receiving the Blessing. It all still tore at the entire Mendoza family, Lance’s parents in particular. They didn’t like to talk about it, or at least Hunk had never heard them talk about it, and he spent as much time at Lance’s house as at his own apartment. Was it worth it, dredging up old hurts for a chance at some small protection?

“No.” Lance squared his shoulders, swiped his screen, and tapped an icon from his contact list. The phone rang, once again on speaker, and Lance went back to pacing.

A woman picked up on the third ring. “Hey, there, baby cousin, how’s it shaking?”

Lance picked up a vial of wakefulness potion Hunk kept handy for brews that required him to stay vigilant through the night. Shaking the vial so the orange liquid sloshed against the stopper, Lance said, “Oh, you know...”

He let the sentiment hang, and Hunk shook his head. _Shouldn’t have let the baby cousin thing pass,_ he thought, amused. If there was one thing Hunk knew for absolute certain about Val Mendoza, it was that she never missed a tell. Sure enough:

“What’s wrong?” The bright, bubbly cheer was gone from Val’s voice, and Lance winced, setting the wakefulness potion down on edge so it wobbled a little before finding its balance.

“Wrong?” Lance asked. “Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s peachy. What’s wrong with you?”

There was a jingle of keys over the phone. “Where are you? Did you get arrested again for those free readings of yours? I _told_ you, Lance, you need to stick to the--”

“What--that-- _Val!_ That was _one time_!” Lance cried, voice shrill.

“Twice if you count mall security." Val's voice slowed, concern replaced with mild amusement. "Technically speaking--”

“ _I’m not under arrest, Val._ ”

“Are you sure? Your aura’s doing that oily thing it does when you’re afraid to fess up.”

Lance actually looked down at himself, and only seemed to realize what he was doing when Hunk burst out laughing. Turning around to lean back against Hunk’s prep counter, Lance glared at his phone. “Nice try, Val, but we both know you can’t see auras over the phone.”

“But I can _hear_ them.”

Lance’s lips twitched toward a smile. “Liar.”

“I prefer the term ‘creative license,’” Val said.

“Creative license,” Lance said flatly.

Val laughed. “Sure. I know how to read people over the phone—you would not _believe_ how many people refuse to meet me in person once they hear I’m psychic—and I know _you_ well enough to know what your auras look like. Combine those two facts, and I might as well be able to hear your auras.”

Lance rolled his eyes, made a show of covering the phone’s mic. “Ladies and gentlemen: my cousin the poet.”

Hunk snickered.

“Okay, Lance, spill. Why’d you call?”

“Because I love you and I wanted to chat?”

Val hummed, and something that sounded suspiciously like a car door slammed near her. “Nope.”

If Lance was suspicious, he turned downright mutinous when Val started her car. “What are you doing?”

“Coming over.”

“Mateo’s sleeping.”

“And you’re at Hunk’s.”

Lance narrowed his eyes. “No I’m not.”

Hunk swore he could _hear_ Val’s raised eyebrows.

Lance hunched his shoulders. “If I get to the point, will you still come over?”

“That depends. What are you about to ask that you don’t want me getting involved in?”

Hunk stuck the lid back on the cauldron of protective potion and turned his attention to the other brew, checking the consistency. “Just ask her,” he muttered.

Lance sighed. “Do you know the name of the demon who gave Mateo his Blessing?”

Silence.

Lance stared hard at Hunk, a silent accusation in the arch of his eyebrow. Hunk did his best to ignore it, keeping his eyes trained on his potions until Val finally spoke again.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“But--” The call cut out and Lance sighed, tossing his phone down on the table. “I guess I’ll see you then.”

Hunk smiled to himself as he worked. “You know you love her.”

Lance lingered by the counter for another moment before rejoining Hunk on the floor. He gathered up his scattered aloe leaves, ducking his head to hide his smile. “I _guess_ she’s pretty okay. For a psychic.”

Hunk just laughed.

* * *

Ten minutes later, Hunk had both his potions simmering. The protective potion would be done tonight, the other not until tomorrow. It probably wasn’t even necessary, but Hunk liked to be prepared. He’d learned to summon demons in the aftermath of the Turn, when summoners’ mistakes were splashed across newspapers and broadcast live on TV, windblown reporters talking in front of the smoldering remains of apartment buildings.

If it had been anyone other than Lance who’d asked him for help, Hunk would have run screaming the other direction. But Hunk and Lance had been friends—brothers, really—since they were kids. Watching Mateo suffer was like watching his own family suffer, and Hunk would have done anything in his power to help, same as Lance.

The only difference was that Hunk built up his defenses before he jumped into the fire and brimstone.

Hunk and Lance were seated at the kitchen table, packing herb pouches, when Val arrived. They’d end up selling most of the pouches, but Hunk had made up a few special ones for the scouting in two days—powdered elder bark for general protection, dried marigolds to keep away malevolent demons, and morning glory seeds. Morning glory was mostly used by dreamers to keep demons out of their heads; Hunk wasn’t sure if that was really applicable here, but Pidge _had_ said this ritual was based on Matt’s dreams. Hey, it was worth a shot.

The work of filling patterned cloth pouches and passing them off to Lance to sew shut was familiar enough that Val didn’t even blink when she stepped inside and hollered a greeting. It was raining, Val’s hair falling around her shoulders in damp curls, her knee-high boots dark with rainwater to above the ankles. These she peeled off by the door, and she hung her coat on a hook before coming toward them.

“You’re always complaining about being cold, and yet you insist on wearing dresses?” Lance teased, poking his needle into a pincushion and going to throw his arms around Val.

She laughed, running her fingers through her hair and flicking droplets of rainwater at Lance. “Shut up and let me steal your body heat.” A few years ago, Val would have been able to smile at Hunk over Lance’s head, but he’d hit another growth spurt and now stood a few fingers taller than his cousin, who propped her chin up on his shoulder and wiggled her fingers at Hunk. “I hope he’s not bothering you.”

Lance pulled back, gasping dramatically. “ _Me_? Never.”

“He’s fine, Val.” Hunk lifted the pouch he was packing full of holly and ash. “Keeping me company while I’m making more stuff for the shop.”

Val arched an eyebrow in Lance’s direction. “So... talking your ear off?”

“Like you’re any better, prima donna,” Lance muttered, hip-checking her toward the couch. “Want some water or something? I’m sure Hunk has some leftover cookies around here somewhere.”

“Don’t you think Hunk should be the one offering any food he may or may not have to share?”

Hunk chuckled, pinned the last pouch shut, and grabbed the tupperware platter full of cookies from the top of the fridge. He popped the lid off and slid the tray onto the coffee table with a smile. “Help yourself. Want some milk?”

“Twist my arm, why don’tcha,” Val muttered, already biting into an oatmeal raisin. She swallowed, glowering at Hunk as he handed her a glass of milk. “What demon did you make a deal with to cook like this, and do you think they’d trade for my inability to carry a tune?”

Hunk laughed, joining Val in the living room. Lance loitered in the kitchen as long as he could without arousing suspicion, then joined them, sitting on the couch beside Val, his legs jangling restlessly.

Val looked at them, then at Lance’s pinched face.

What followed was one of the most entertaining non-conversations Hunk had ever witnessed. He was used to families communicating through facial expressions and gestures—that was how most of Hunk’s moms’ arguments played out, until one of them caved and apologized for something Hunk hadn’t realized was at issue.

This was different. A slight lift in Val’s eyebrow, a minute hunch to Lance’s shoulders, at odds with his stubborn pout. Both watched the other with steady eyes, gazes far-off like they were reading teleprompters on opposite sides of the room.

It was rare for two psychics to know each other well enough to communicate through auras, but Val and Lance had grown up together. Val had taught Lance most of what he knew about reading auras, for that matter, and she’d practiced on him as much as on her brother Sebastian.

Hunk grabbed a white chocolate chip cookie and sat back to watch the show. Lance’s eye twitched, which made Val flash a tiny little smirk, almost of victory. Lance leaned suddenly forward, his nose hovering an inch from hers, his eyes narrowed to slits. He poked her once in the shoulder and she swatted him away.

Just like that, their… argument? Maybe? Was finished, and Lance slumped back against one arm of the couch in defeat.

Val turned to Hunk, as pleasant as if the last five minutes hadn’t happened. “So when did you two summon a demon?”

Hunk choked on his cookie.

Val smothered a laugh as Hunk started to cough. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist.”

“Because you’re a _snot_ ,” Lance said, sulking at the far end of the couch.

Val nudged him with her toe. “Seriously, though. What’s going on? Why are you suddenly so interested in the demon who Blessed Mateo?”

Lance hesitated, then slowly uncurled and sat up to look Val in the eye. “We met someone. A talismaner who thinks she might be able to help, but she needs to know more about the demon—a name, at least. More would be better. I… didn’t want to go to Mom and Dad about it.”

“Probably smart.” Val grabbed another cookie and broke off a piece to toss into her mouth. “I know a little bit about that demon. Her name, at least. I’ll tell you… but you have to tell me what else you’ve been up to.”

Lance hesitated. “I’m not sure you really want to know...”

All Val did was eat her cookie. At least, that was all Hunk could see. Lance must have seen something in her aura that convinced him not to fight, though, because he just sighed in defeat.

“We… _might_ have, kind of, accidentally, summoned a demon and got her stuck here.” Lance finished his sentence in a rush that left Val blinking, her cookie forgotten.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “ _What?_ ”

“We summoned a demon?” Lance said, flashing her his best, most innocent grin. “And we don’t know how to send her back?”

Val stared at him for a long moment, unblinking. Then she started laughing. Hunk found himself smiling, too, nervously, and pretending he didn’t see Lance scowl. That was a better reaction than Hunk had been expecting, honestly. He didn’t know what Lance was complaining about.

“Okay, okay.” Val waved her hand, biting her knuckle to stifle her laughter. “You’re gonna have to start from the beginning on this one. Don’t worry,” she added before Lance could start talking. “I’ll be sure to bail you out when you get yourselves arrested.”

Lance groaned, pressing a throw pillow against his face.

* * *

“Okay.” Hunk sat back on his heels, staring at the sketch he and Pidge had worked out on a large sheet of craft paper spread out on the floor. Keith hovered nearby, and the fact that he wasn’t pointing out anything else he thought needed fixing said that, maybe, they’d finally come to the end of it. “I think we’ve got it.”

“Are you for real this time?” Lance asked, not looking up from the game of poker he was playing with Allura at the kitchen table. “Or do I have time to teach Allura blackjack, too?”

Pidge lifted her head and snorted. “I don’t know if you can afford to teach Allura any more games.”

Lance stuck his tongue out at Pidge, but his face fell when he glanced down at his thin supply of pennies—the apartment’s substitute for poker chips. Allura had a much larger supply sitting in front of her, and she smiled winningly at Lance, fanning herself with her cards.

With a scowl, Lance tossed his cards down on the table and joined the others by their sketch. “Seriously, though. We’re good?”

Pidge nodded. Hunk had been a little surprised to arrive today to find Pidge up to her nose in crumpled pieces of paper. A tired-looking Keith had grabbed Hunk by the elbow and towed him over to her desk, flicked the back of Pidge’s head, and ordered her to ask for help.

Evidently she’d taken Hunk’s caution to heart and decided to add some defenses onto the scouting ritual her dad had designed. The circle as written was designed for three people, and Pidge was trying to add two more as anchors using Hunk’s designs as inspiration.

She’d mostly figured it out already, but the two of them had gotten a little lost in the theory. It was getting late now, but they were finally ready.

“Okay,” Pidge said, starting to copy the spell onto the freshly-cleaned linoleum. “So Hunk and Allura are going to be our anchors.”

“Allura?” Lance asked.

Allura shrugged. “I have every reason to want this ritual to succeed,” she said. “I suppose it’s too much to ask you to let me _go_ to Altea...” She paused, as though expecting someone to contradict her, then sighed. “But I will at least help you from here.”

Hunk patted his pocket, where the second of his two potions waited. “And I’ve got a backup plan ready in case things go really wrong.”

“Which hopefully they won’t,” Pidge said.

Keith snorted, and Pidge poked his ankle with her inked brush. He stared down at her, wrinkling his nose.

Grinning to herself, Pidge went back to work. “Me, Keith, and Lance will be the ones actually sending our consciousness to Altea, which is about as close as we can hope to get to matching the parameters of the original experiment.”

Lance blinked and glanced at Hunk.

“Two psychics and one... not-psychic,” Hunk said, and Lance’s mouth formed an ‘O’ of understanding. Hunk wasn’t sure that it would actually matter _who_ performed the ritual, but he’d never say no to one more precaution.

Pidge finished the main body of the spell, and Hunk took over, drawing the anchoring circles he and Allura would occupy. “I’ve got some herb pouches for us, and a protective potion for the three of you who are going in. Should at least annoy demons enough to keep them away while you’re under.”

Hunk finished the second circle and sat back. He looked up just in time to catch the tail-end of a very meaningful exchange of looks between Keith and Pidge.

“What?”

“Nothing,” said Pidge, a little too quickly.

Lance frowned. “What aren’t you telling us?”

The glare Keith turned his way could have iced a circle as quick as any spell. “One, it’s none of your business. And two, if you try to go behind my back and read it in my aura, we’re done.”

“I can’t exactly shut this off, you know,” Lance said, waving one hand over his eyes. “But fine. Whatever. I’ll lay off, as long as you can promise me this secret isn’t going to put any of us at risk.”

“You’re fine,” Keith said. “Pidge and I have it under control.”

That wasn’t exactly comforting, but Hunk wasn’t the sort of person to poke at sleeping bears. He distributed his herb pouches, then handed Pidge and Keith a vial of potion each. Pidge downed it at once, grimacing at the bitter taste, but Keith hesitated.

“It’s fine,” Hunk said, handing the last dose to Lance, who swirled it and sniffed like a sommelier at a wine tasting. “Perfectly safe.”

“I’m sure it is,” Keith said.

“But…?”

Keith refused to meet Hunk’s eyes. “Potions and I tend not to get along.”

Hunk glanced at Lance, automatically checking to see if Lance had spotted a lie. (He wasn’t as good a human lie detector as his cousin, but he came close.) Surprisingly, though, Lance just looked perplexed.

Realizing Hunk was waiting on him, Lance shook his head. “If he doesn’t want the protection, that’s his business. Doesn’t put the rest of us in any more danger, does it?”

Hunk breathed in, then paused. “Well, no, but--”

“Great!” Lance clapped his hands together. “So are we doing this or not?”

A few minutes of confusion followed as everyone shuffled around, taking their places in the circle—literally _inside_ the circle, in the case of Pidge, Lance, and Keith—and running through one final check of the wards. Pidge was the last to pass judgment, and when she did she turned to Hunk and nodded.

“Send us in, Hunk.”

Hunk breathed in through his nose and let out a long, shaky breath, then started the ritual. It was a simple spell—the circle was the important part, and the spoken words were no more complicated than a regular summoning. But he took it slow, unwilling to mess this up.

The effects were instantaneous. A wind whipped up around the room, but it only seemed to catch on the three kneeling in the center of the circle. Keith was the first to waver, catching himself with a hand before he toppled. Lance nearly fell on top of him a moment later.

Hunk barely had time to wonder whether that was supposed to happen before all three of them went limp in a tangle of limbs, a handful of ice crystals gathering on their eyelashes.

 _Be safe,_ Hunk thought, fingering the potion in his pocket. _Please, just come back safe._


	5. Demon-Touched

> _Demonic sorcery comes in many forms. One of the most powerful is a demon’s Touch—often called a Blessing prior to the Turn. If allowed to come in direct physical contact with a human, a demon may impart a portion of their magic into the victim, leaving behind a mark that often resembles a tattoo or a scar._
> 
> _The demon-touched may experience any number of symptoms depending on the demon’s intent. In years past, Blessings often conferred good health, keen focus, or athletic ability. Since the Turn, Touches are more likely to bring pain, hallucinations, ill health, or death._

\--From the Garrison School of Spellcraft’s _Handbook of Demonology_ , Chapter 5: “Demon-Touched”

* * *

Entering Altea was a lot like falling asleep.

Pidge, who like her father was not a psychic, had no first-hand experience with the Sight, but she’d read up on it as much as any sixteen-year-old with a penchant for hacking Garrison mainframes could. She knew how dreamers described the process—the slow lull as her body prepared for rest, the sudden drop, jerking back to wakefulness in the _elsewhere_.

It still caught her by surprise.

When the ritual took root and Pidge fell, she expected to hit the floor. She did not. The falling sensation persisted an instant longer, just long enough for Pidge to let out a strangled cry.

Then a hand closed around her upper arm, steadying her, and she came back to herself. She still felt like she was floating, though she seemed to be standing on solid ground. Maybe that was a property of Altea, maybe part of the ritual, but she couldn’t help the tingle in her spine that said if she’d had any physical weight in this realm, she might have fallen straight through the ground.

Lance stood a few steps ahead of her, wide-eyed as he stared around the emerald hills they’d landed in. Mountains rose in the distance, and a city sparkled with lights in the valley, where the twilight had begun to gather. Keith, who had grabbed Pidge as they entered, hardly spared the countryside a second glance.

“Freaky,” Lance muttered. He blinked rapidly, the way Matt did when a contact got scrunched up in the corner of his eye, and squinted. “This place is giving me a headache.”

Keith raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

“It’s—It’s too...” Lance waved his hand vaguely. “It’s like watching a 3D movie without the glasses. You can’t see it?”

Pidge shook her head. “Must be because you can read auras,” she said. She wanted to follow that train of thought, see where it led, why there would be auras around this world when demons didn’t have any—or what about this world Lance _could_ see that wasn’t an aura at all.

But her head felt muddled, her thoughts slow to surface. “Damn,” she muttered rubbing her eyes. “I know I was up late last night, but it feels like I pulled an all-nighter or two.”

“Huh.” Keith sounded strange, and Pidge looked up at him, fighting a yawn.

“What?”

Keith shook his head. “Nothing. It just seems strange to me that you’re both being affected by this place when I’m...”

He trailed off, glancing at Lance. Pidge caught on a moment later and straightened her spine, shaking her head to clear her thoughts. She needed to be sharp for this. Needed… to…

“Let’s hurry.”

Keith’s voice triggered another brief moment of vertigo, and Pidge groaned, rubbing her eyes. _No._ She’d fought through exhaustion before in the name of this search. She could hold it off for an hour. (Just an hour. Hunk had been unwilling to let the ritual go any longer than that. Pidge was starting to think he’d been right to worry.)

“So, wait a minute.” Lance stalked over, still squinting, and jabbed at Keith. Or, well, at the air in front of him. Lance frowned and tried again, this time poking his index finger into Keith’s chest. “Are you telling me you’re all peachy keen in here?”

Keith swatted his hand away. “Not completely. Feels like I’m floating, and nothing feels entirely tangible. But that’s not much different from a vision. It doesn’t bother me.”

Lance rolled his eyes, winced, and pressed the heel of his hand to his eyes. “Not fair.”

With a snort, Keith turned. “Let’s just… see what’s down in that town.”

Keith had hardly finished speaking before he vanished. Just. Flat-out vanished. Pidge blinked at the place where he’d been while Lance yelped, scrambling backward.

Oh. Right.

Pidge grabbed Lance’s wrist. His shouts—right, he’d still been shouting; Pidge must have been tuning him out—quieted at her touch, but he was frowning. It took a moment for Pidge to realize he was waiting for an explanation.

“Damn this brain fog,” she muttered, drawing in a deep breath and biting the inside of her cheek. She needed to stay awake. “It’s a dream. You think of a place and you’re there. No need to walk.”

“Oh.” Lance’s shoulders slumped. He glanced at the city below them. “So Keith’s...”

“In Demonopolis down there? Yup. C'mon.” She gave his arm a tug. “We should be able to stick together as long as we… stick… together. _Wow_ , words are really not here for me today.”

Lance snorted. “Well, you at least know what you’re doing. And can see.” He gestured with his free hand. “Lead on.”

Pidge took a few breaths, banishing her drowsiness, and thought of Keith, and the city he’d probably gone to. Tried to picture him on the streets. Strangely modern-looking streets. Somehow Pidge had been expecting something more...medieval. This place might have been New York City, all metal and glass and neon lights, or something that looked very much the same.

There was another instantaneous dip in her gut, and she almost face-planted onto the asphalt. The adrenaline rush gave her a nice burst of clarity, and by the time she straightened, Keith was there, his face pinched into a frown.

“What?” she asked.

“Something’s wrong.”

Footsteps sounded against the pavement, and Keith spun around as a lone Galra came charging toward them, shooting frequent looks over his shoulder. Pidge tensed, expecting a fight as soon as he noticed them, but he kept coming, showing no sign that he realized they were even there.

Keith and Lance were already moving aside before Pidge realized the Galra was on a collision-course, and by then it was too late. The Galra ran right into her…

And right on through to the other side of her.

It was like getting slapped in the face. There had been no physical sensation to the non-collision, just an overwhelming sense of _wrongness_ that reverberated through Pidge’s nerves like the wail of a train whistle.

“Well then,” she said, trying to force the tension out of her muscles. “That’s _one_ way to wake up.”

Keith sidled up beside her, radiating quiet concern.

“I’m fine,” she said. “What was he running from?”

“I don’t know, but that’s the first demon I’ve seen.” Keith glanced over at Lance, who shrugged. He was still squinting like he had the sun in his eyes, but he’d begun to move in the direction the Galra had come from. Pidge nudged Keith, then followed Lance.

They rounded the corner onto another empty street lined with high rises and billboards and horseless carriages in the truest sense of the word, parked streetside so that it looked like Cinderella's ball had gotten dumped on top of a modern city. It would have been creepy enough even if the street hadn't been completely empty. Had they landed themselves in a post-apocalyptic wasteland or something? They made it a block and a half before Pidge heard something.

“Is that…?” Lance glanced at her, pale and blinking furiously in an attempt to keep his eyes open. “Is that screaming?”

Keith was already running, his silver knife in his hand. Pidge wasn’t sure it would do him any _good_ , considering they were basically ghosts here, but she let him have this small comfort. Not like whatever he was going to find would be a threat to him, anyway.

Keith froze in the entrance to some kind of open-air mall, dozens of store-fronts on three levels overlooking a tiled courtyard with a fountain burbling away at the center. Escalators ran quietly between the levels, and some vague, cheery music played over hidden speakers. The screams were much closer now, close enough to see their source. Pidge blinked, and she was standing beside Keith, looking out over a sea of corpses.

Alteans and Galra alike littered the mall, piled up around storefronts, huddled under tables in the open area, tossed carelessly into the fountain. Red and violet blood washed the courtyard in vivid hues, and sightless eyes stared at Pidge across the open air.

Pidge could do nothing but return their empty stares, distantly aware that she was trembling. Lance appeared beside her and sucked in a sharp breath.

“Oh my _god_.”

Motion from one of the stores drew Pidge’s eye. A Galra ducked his head as he exited, high-stepping over the bodies in his path. His left arm glowed with a vicious purple light, blood dripping from his claws, and one yellow eye had gone dim, a scar cutting a line across his purple fur.

Pidge knew that face.

“ _Sendak_ ,” Keith snarled, hatred making his voice almost unrecognizable. He spoke too softly for Sendak to have possibly heard him from across the courtyard, even if they hadn't been entirely insubstantial, but apparently Sendak was a miracle worker. He spun, his eyes locking on Keith before the name had fully passed his lips.

Grinning a horrible, sharp-fanged grin, Sendak charged.

* * *

Twenty minutes had passed since Hunk started the ritual. Twenty minutes of the allotted hour—Hunk had a kitchen timer running beside him to keep track. No way in hell was he leaving Lance and the other two under for any longer than he had to.

He wished he could adjust their bodies. They’d crumpled awkwardly on top of each other in the main circle, limbs twisted, necks at odd angles. If not for Pidge’s snoring and the way Lance’s face scrunched up every so often, Hunk might have thought they were dead. He wasn’t entirely sure Keith _wasn’t_. He was perfectly still, the rise and fall of his chest so subtle Hunk might have been imagining it.

But Allura wasn’t worried, so Hunk was trying not to be, either.

Easier said than done. He kept his eye on the circle, glancing toward Allura only infrequently to see if anything in her expression had changed. (It hadn’t. It never did.)

“So...” Hunk paused, giving her a slightly longer look. Her eyes flicked toward him, but she gave no other sign that she’d heard him speak. Hunk cleared his throat. “So, uh, how are you doing?”

Allura clicked her tongue, her gaze shooting toward the ceiling. “Is now _really_ the time for small talk?”

“Sorry, sorry.” Hunk rubbed the back of his head and refocused on the circle. “I’m just… trying to distract myself.”

“They’ll be fine,” Allura said. She sounded worried, which somehow surprised Hunk. He would have thought she didn’t care about the people who’d summoned her—trapped her here, honestly—except as far as she had to to avoid breaking contract. But she seemed genuinely worried about the unconscious trio, and that, weirdly, made Hunk feel better.

“Pidge knows what she’s doing,” Hunk said.

Allura turned toward him, a knowing smile on her face. “She certainly is competent. Almost _too_ \--”

A sudden gust of wind silenced her, and Hunk sat upright, staring at his sleeping friends. Was the ritual ending early?

No.

No, this definitely wasn’t Lance and the others waking up. Something dark and cold was creeping toward the circle, some malicious energy that raised the hairs along Hunk’s arm. He reached for the bottle of potion in the pocket of his cargo shorts—but hesitated as he pulled it out.

Would this really work? Well, okay, Hunk was pretty sure it would _work_ , he’d made nullifying potions before, and they canceled out any magic they touched—pentacles, talismans, even other potions. They didn’t work on demonic magic, at least not directly. (Hunk should know; he’d been trying to make a potion work on Mateo’s Blessing for a year.) But it would destroy the bridge the sorcery was using to cross into this world.

But a sudden thought stopped him, and he couldn’t believe he hadn’t considered the possibility before now: what if canceling the spell now got the others’ consciousnesses stranded on Altea?

“Hunk!” Allura shouted. “What are you waiting for?”

“I-I--” Hunk swallowed, hand shaking as he pulled the flask out of his pocket. “I don’t--”

“This is Galra energy! Something’s gone wrong with the ritual. If you’re going to do something, do it _now_!”

But Hunk was still frozen and so, with a frustrated cry, Allura stood up in her anchoring circle, her hair and skirts whipping around her in a wind that gained more force with every passing second. She raised her hands, fingers spread, and Hunk was forcibly reminded of the way she’d attacked Keith four days ago when they’d first summoned her.

Hunk cringed, waiting for the lightning, but nothing happened.

Allura’s face changed, anger replaced with utter shock. “ _What_?”

“What are you doing?” Hunk asked, hands half-raised to shield himself. “What’s happening?”

“My… my sorcery. It’s not...” Allura’s head snapped up, her voice turning hard and commanding. “Hunk, your potion. Use it now!”

There was no arguing with that voice. Hands shaking, Hunk pulled the stopper from the flask, then flicked the mouth toward his friends’ crumpled bodies, spraying them and the circle with potion.

The wind died at once. The temperature rose so sharply it made Hunk briefly light-headed.

Pidge gasped, Lance thrashed against some unknown nightmare, and both shot upright in the circle.

Keith remained utterly still.

* * *

Keith stood, frozen, as Sendak charged. That one horrible, glowing eye, the scar across his face—a scar Keith had given him nearly eleven months ago—the sadistic grin that made Keith’s blood run cold.

It was too much, to sharp, too lucid, the way a vision was sometimes overpowering. It locked his joints and turned his muscles to lead, and all the world contracted to that terrible, familiar face.

A sudden vacuum at his side told him Pidge and Lance had gone, and Keith knew he should go too. He tried to think of another place. The field where he’d first arrived on Altea, the scorched flagstone square he’d seen once in a vision, the castle that appeared in every textbook on demons, always rendered slightly differently, where it was said King Alfor lived.

His eyes remained riveted on Sendak, and his mind refused to carry him anywhere else. Something tugged at his insides, making the world blur for just an instant, and something within him _twisted_ , an awful, sickening sensation that bent him double.

The loss of eye contact seemed to break some spell, and Keith forced all his will into a single, desperate wish: _away_.

The world lurched, his vision faded. He saw Sendak’s one good eye staring at him, his glowing hand reaching out to rend flesh from bone. The blood on his claw tips seemed impossibly clear as everything else ceased to be.

Then Keith was drifting, his thoughts loose and disordered, all sense of direction lost to the shifting shadows that caressed him. He tried to think, tried to remember, tried to--

Pidge.

Where was Pidge?

He sat upright—or tried to. He seemed more mist than body now, a vague collection of memories drifting on a night wind. He wasn’t sure he even _had_ limbs to control anymore.

He had to focus. Pidge was gone. Lance, too. That tug at his center—he had a sinking feeling it had been Hunk, going ahead with whatever backup plan he’d had in mind. Sendak’s presence must have bled over to that side. Or maybe some other interference had been what allowed Sendak to sense Keith in the first place.

Keith’s arm—or what part of his mind sill recognized his arm—twinged with pain, and he curled in on himself, a little current through his presence that made him feel shaky and cold.

If Keith’s assumptions were true, things were looking very bad. He was stuck here, maybe temporarily, maybe forever. He wished he could see into the human world, know for certain what was happening. He wanted to be back, wanted this whole expedition to have been good for something—something other than a second run-in with Sendak. He wanted to stop drifting, to gather himself and feel human again. _  
_

He wanted his brother.

A wave of raw power, like the otherworldly shiver that accompanied a vision, but stronger, washed over him. He wavered, strained so hard he thought his very soul might break.

And then the darkness lifted, and he was standing somewhere new, back in his body (or whatever approximation of a body he had while caught in the scouting ritual.) Around him were low plaster walls, crumbling, a partial roof overhead shedding tiles onto the linoleum beneath him. Glass orbs hung from the ceiling—light bulbs, only not. They glowed very faintly, just enough to light the room around him.

Keith gave a start as he spotted a Galra, pale lavender and furless except for a crest of white running from his forehead over the crown of his head, standing by a grimy window that overlooked a city street. (Another city, Keith thought, not where he’d seen Sendak. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he _knew_ , with that same intangible certainty his visions always brought.)

He wondered if this _was_ a vision, distorted because of the ritual and because he was actually on Altea, but his musings didn’t get far. Another figure knelt in the far corner beneath the brightest of the glowing glass orbs, his jacket ragged and heavily patched, his shoulders hunched, his back bowed.

Keith’s feet carried him forward before his mind started turning again.

“Shiro?” he whispered. As soon as he spoke, he stood in front of his brother, staring down at a scarred, weary face with dark circles framing tired eyes and a patch of shocking white in his hair. For a moment Keith forgot how to breath.

Shiro breathed out heavily, then reached out with one gloved hand and laid something on the ground at Keith’s feet. Keith stepped back instinctively and saw several other scraps of paper lying on the ground. He knelt, and saw numbers and hasty symbols inked onto paper that had been worn to a velvety texture.

Tarot cards.

They were poor approximations of the real thing, no artwork, just numbers and symbols that barely carried across the meaning. A circle for pentacles, a semi-circle for cups, a cross for swords, and a simple line for wands.

Shiro must have been desperate. A deck like this made a poor conduit—less than useless in the hands of someone like Keith. (Which, admittedly, wasn’t much of a baseline, since Keith could barely get a real deck to work.) Shiro was the best tarot reader Keith knew, but even Shiro had to be struggling with these cards.

As if hearing Keith’s thoughts, Shiro let out a frustrated growl and shoved the rest of his deck aside.

The Galra by the window turned. “No luck?”

“No,” Shiro said, closing his eyes as he visibly struggled for calm. “There’s nothing. I don’t know if it’s me, or the cards, or if the Sight just doesn’t work over here.”

“Try again.”

Shiro turned, his face hardening. “I’ve _been_ trying, Ulaz. How many readings have I done now? Two or three every day since you broke me out? I’ve got _nothing_.”

A sudden idea came over Keith, startling him out of the stupor he’d fallen into on seeing his brother. Another reading.

Keith lurched forward, grasping at Shiro’s deck, but his hands passed through it.

“Shit,” Keith breathed. He wasn’t here, not really. He couldn’t affect this world any more than he could talk to Shiro directly. But maybe--

“One more reading,” Ulaz repeated. “We need guidance, Shiro. If I cannot reach my allies, it must come from you.”

Keith urged Shiro to listen, to do one more reading. Just one more. Keith could make this work, but he _needed_ Shiro to do the reading.

After a breathless moment, Shiro gathered up his cards, shuffled the deck as best he could, then straightened it, ready to cut the deck—as he always did, Keith knew. His brother was very particular about how he did his readings.

Keith reached out as Shiro ran his thumb along the edges of the cards. Once, when Keith was young and just coming into his powers, Shiro had tried a joint reading. They’d still thought Keith would use tarot back then. He’d only been seven, and the house Shiro’s parents had owned still felt strange and foreign.

Keith had agreed to try the readings because his new brother (Takashi said to call him brother, but Keith wasn’t sure yet) seemed so excited to try. Keith had already memorized all the cards—their names, at least, and most of their common meanings. He’d even tried a few readings on his own, but all the cards had shown him was despair and depression and failure.

Takashi hadn’t believed him, which was why they’d tried the joint reading, Keith cutting the deck and laying the cards, Shiro helping him interpret. They’d stuck to single-card readings, shuffling and re-cutting the deck each time.

After the fourth straight reading turned up the inverted Sun (which, among other things, meant a lack of success), Keith had complained that he was doomed to be a failure.

Shiro, on the other hand, had seemed excited by the news.

As it turned out, Keith _was_ terrible at tarot reading, but not because he lacked the Sight. Rather, his Sight was too attuned to details. He could see the cards when he cut the deck—not see them in a physical sense, but intuitively—and he tended to cut the deck to the card _he_ wanted.

It was another two years before he had his first proper vision, and even those had never been consistent enough for Keith to learn even a slight measure of control, so he was doomed to forever bias his own readings.

Today, though, that was a good thing.

Keith placed his hand over Shiro’s as Shiro went to cut the deck. Keith’s hand burned where they touched—or didn’t touch. Heat seamed to radiate from Shiro’s arm, just shy of painful. Keith ignored it, bending his will toward Shiro, hoping against hope that this miniscule amount of influence was not beyond him.

Shiro cut the deck, and turned over the Sun. Inverted. (This was not the sun of Keith’s Rider-Waite deck, with a stoic-faced yellow sun overlooking a naked baby on a white horse. Nor was it in the style of Shiro’s deck, with stark black shadows, muted gold and blue and red hues, with the sun burning like a corona above a mountain’s peak while spirits danced in the foreground. It was instead a blank piece of paper with the word _Sun_ written in plain handwriting.)

Keith grinned, inordinately satisfied with himself for this small victory. Shiro paused, staring at the card, and Keith’s good mood faltered. _Failure_. Great. Here Shiro was, convinced his readings were useless, and Keith had to go and give him a mystical sign that he really was doomed.

 _Great job, Keith,_ he thought bitterly.

But Shiro looked more shaken than resigned. He shuffled the Sun card back into the deck and cut it again. Again Keith guided him, urging him to stop where _Keith_ wanted.

The Sun came up again, once more inverted.

Shiro flipped it around, shuffling more thoroughly, turning half the deck each time he shuffled.

The Sun came up again, and Keith didn’t know if it was his influence or Shiro’s psychic abilities or pure _luck_ that brought it up inverted, but there it was.

Shiro’s hands were shaking now, and his voice cracked as he asked, “Who are you?”

Keith’s throat felt thick as they repeated the process, Keith stopping Shiro so that the card he flipped was the Hermit. Keith’s card.

Without the image there (an old man with a lantern in one deck; in the other a hooded figure surrounded by bluebirds, the sky behind them a chaotic swirl of black and white) it took a moment for Keith to realize it was inverted. Shiro’s handwriting stared at him, a silent accusation.

_Isolation. Fear. Recklessness._

“Keith,” Shiro said, and his voice sounded jagged. Keith looked up in time to see the tears gathering in Shiro’s eyes.

Then the room blurred, and Keith was torn away.

* * *

Dreaming in the realm of demons was strange, and not only because Matt was more lucid asleep than he was awake.

Time was strange in the dream. That was always true, Matt supposed. Even back on Earth, the length and complexity of his dreams didn’t correlate to the amount of time he spent asleep. But here, he could see it more plainly, because here, he didn’t dream in abstracts, in warped symbology and flickering images.

On Altea, when Matt dreamed, he simply stepped out of his body.

Often, he stayed close to his sleeping body—to his father, and the two demons who were sheltering them. It was safer that way, and he could easily see how much time was passing. Sometimes they seemed to move through molasses, and Matt could have watched an entire movie in the time it took them to start a campfire. Other times, Matt had barely gained his bearings before dawn broke in the waking world, though he’d fallen asleep before dusk.

It was worse when he traveled. Time passed between leaving and arriving, and it was impossible to say how much. Less if he was traveling somewhere within sight, it seemed. More when he tried to pull himself toward less concrete goals. Once he’d blinked from city to city in search of Shiro, quickly losing count of the places he’d gone.

Matt had grown frustrated after what felt, to him, less than an hour. But when he awoke, his father had burst into tears and hugged him like Lazarus come back from the dead.

He’d been asleep for a week, that time.

The worst thing was his waking hours passed in a fog. His body may have rested while he dreamed, but his mind was wide awake. He tried not to think too hard about how long they’d been on Altea, because he was mostly certain he’d been awake, in one sense or another, for the entire time.

He still couldn’t find Shiro.

He searched every night, for as long as his father would let him dream. Sometimes traveling, sometimes casting his attention wide in hopes of sensing Shiro (this strategy hadn’t turned up any leads on that front, but it had warned them of danger on more than one occasion.) Sometimes he just sat beside his father and talked to the unhearing void, chatting aimlessly in a way that always seemed too much of a burden when he was awake.

Every now and then when he did this, a different sort of dream would steal over him. The kind he was used to—impressionistic paintings of the subconscious, which he had to tease apart before he could wake up and try to translate into plain English.

That was how they’d found their second ally, just a few days ago. A flash of white walls, a man on a hilltop watching over a pride of lions, and a street Matt didn’t recognize.

Today was a day for casting his psychic nets, so Matt sat cross-legged on one of the castle’s many balconies. He could see an army milling below, their motions just a fraction faster than they should have been. In the dream, Matt could pick out the threads of energy surrounding the castle. Defensive sorcery, apparently. Matt had it on good authority those wards could keep out anything short of Zarkon himself.

Matt’s body slept in the room behind him, where his father was helping the two demons search the archives for the spell that was their best and only chance of ending this war. Which would have been great, except Matt hadn’t signed up for a war. He wasn’t even sure how _he’d_ become part of the rag-tag band of rebels leading the counterattack.

All he knew was that the first several months of his time here had passed in a haze, Matt unable to control his dreaming, Sam unwilling to act for fear of worsening Matt’s condition. The first time Matt had regained consciousness, it was to find he’d been varying stages of incoherent for four and a half months, and Shiro had sacrificed himself to a hostile demon army to give Sam a chance to get Matt to safety.

The knowledge burned in Matt’s chest, a hot ember ready to flare up whenever his resolved wavered. Shiro was still out there—he had to be. There were plenty of reasons why Matt might not have been able to find him after all these months of searching.

Matt wasn’t giving up.

He was, however, getting smart. Traveling randomly around the world in search of one lone human had gained him precisely nothing. Now he only traveled when he had a lead to follow.

Something twinged his awareness, an entity far-off in the physical world but eminently present in Matt’s mind. It was unlike anything he’d sensed before, but something about it seemed… familiar.

Matt stood, focusing his mind toward the familiar presence, and willed himself to travel.

Except _Matt_ didn’t move. Instead, the other presence shot toward him, skimming through the dream, as thought it was untethered somehow, insubstantial.

Matt had just enough time to wonder whether he’d brushed up against another dreamer’s mind before a figure materialized from vapor an arm’s length from Matt’s face.

The boy’s eyes widened, but he was still flying toward Matt, and there was no time for either of them to move aside (if, in fact, the other dreamer _could_ have changed his trajectory). They collided in a way that left Matt’s consciousness feeling fuzzy around the edges and skidded to the foot of the door leading back inside.

“Matt?”

Matt blinked, staring up at the other dreamer’s face. A familiar face. A _very_ familiar face.

“ _Keith?_ ” Matt shot upright, his forehead colliding with Keith’s nose, and Keith swore viciously as he collapsed backward. “Oh my god—Sorry. You’re— _what_?” He reached out to help Keith up, but gave up the effort almost immediately. There was no real _touch_ in the dream, and trying to grab Keith only made Matt queasy. So he sat back on his heels and waited for Keith to gather himself. “Are you really here?”

Keith was still rubbing his nose—though of course there was no actual wound, just his brain supplying the pain it thought should be there. “I think so? Define ‘here.’”

A grin tugged at Matt’s lips, and he began to pace. There was no intermediate state between sitting on his heels and pacing. He simply felt the urge to move and the dream jumped straight to the _moving_. It was convenient, once you got used to the sensation of your consciousness progressing like a skipping record.

Keith blinked up at him, his furrowed brow like he _wasn’t_ used to the way the dream worked.

Wait…

“You’re not a dreamer.”

“No,” Keith said slowly. He blinked a few times, then shook his head. “We used the scouting ritual.”

His words shot through Matt’s mind like a shot of espresso. “You _what_? Oh, man, Shiro’s gonna _kill_ you.”

It was funny how easily Matt fell back into teasing Keith, even after a year apart. But his humor faded at once as he remembered that Shiro might not, in fact, get that chance.

Keith seemed not to notice Matt’s mood. He fell back against the door jamb, snorting. “I don’t know, he seemed too happy to see me to be _that_ pissed off. Hell, he’ll probably--”

“You _saw_ Shiro?”

“Yeah. Kinda. He didn’t see me, I don’t think, I’m kinda a ghost right now. Wait.” Keith turned, confusion overtaking his features. “How can _you_ see me?”

Matt waved off his question. “When? When did you see Shiro?”

“Like two seconds ago, Matt, calm down.”

Matt belatedly realized he’d moved closer to Keith, crouching over him, his hands gripping Keith’s shoulders. Sinking slightly into Keith’s shoulders, at that.

Matt let him go. “He’s okay?”

Keith opened his mouth, then hesitated. “You didn’t know.”

“I—no. No, Keith, we haven’t seen him since we got trapped here. I thought he was _dead_.”

“We.” They were standing by the balcony’s railing now, Matt elbows on the bannister, head in his hands. Keith leaned forward beside him, staring at him wide-eyed. “Your dad…?”

Matt gestured toward the door. “We found some friends to help us. We’ve been looking for Shiro. Where is he? Is he okay?”

“Tired,” Keith said. “I think he’s being chased or something. But he’s okay. He’s with a Galra named—I think it was Ulaz?”

“Where?”

“A city? I don’t know. I was only there for a few minutes, and I only saw the inside of this house that was falling apart.”

Matt blew out a long breath. He tried to remember where he’d felt Keith’s presence, before he’d dragged him here for their impromptu reunion. Somewhere to the east. Maybe one of the others would be able to do something with that.

The quality of the dream changed, and for a second Matt thought his father was trying to wake him. Everything took on that same overexposed quality, like the dream was trying to hammer home its last impression.

Then he realized that the veins of slightly-brighter color weren’t streaming toward him, but toward _Keith._

“I think your ritual’s ending,” Matt said, and Keith straightened, starting a question. Matt pressed a finger to his lips. “It’s okay. Tell Katie I miss her. And be _careful_ , Keith. Things are bad on Altea right now. It’s not safe.”

Keith began to fade, but he reached out even as he did, cold fingers encircling Matt’s wrist. “We’re coming,” he said. “We’re coming for you, I prom--”

He was gone before he could finish speaking.

* * *

Sam heard the slight hitch in Matt’s breathing that said he was waking up and left his stack of texts behind to rush to his son’s side.

“Matt,” he said, kneeling down. “Matt, it’s okay. I’m here.”

Matt thrashed, his eyelids fluttering, and reached up weakly to grip Sam’s arms as he pulled Matt into his lap. “Dad…?”

“Yeah,” Sam said. There had been a time when Matt waking up had the power to scare him, but by now it was just another part of the nightly routine. Almost nightly. Matt didn’t always make it back so soon. He got Matt settled on his lap and ran his fingers through his hair, murmuring empty phrases to help Matt reorient to his body.

It would pass, he knew. Just a few moments of panic and disorientation, like Matt was waking from a terrible nightmare. Then he would calm, and the exhaustion would overtake him, and he’d spend the next several hours dozing, grumbling when Sam sat him up to eat.

But something was different this time. Matt was speaking, his voice soft—but urgent. More urgent that Sam could remember it being since the very beginning.

“Keith,” he whispered. “ _Keith_.”

Sam frowned. “What about Keith?”

Matt opened his eyes, blinking owlishly. It was an obvious effort to focus, but he did so, his pupils constricting as he twisted his head back to look at Sam. “Keith found Shiro,” he said. “Keith found Shiro. They’re east.”

Sam frowned. It wasn’t unusual for Matt to spout disjointed phrases in the wake of a dream, but something about this sounded different—though Sam couldn’t fathom how Shiro’s brother might have found him in the demon realm. “They’re east. They… Keith and Shiro?”

Matt shook his head emphatically. “Shiro and Ulaz. They’re east. Somewhere east from here.”

“Did he just say Ulaz?”

Sam turned. Thace had abandoned his research, striding toward Sam and Matt with an odd look on his face. For as long as Sam had known the man—first through a number of summonings and then here on Altea, where Thace had risked his own life to get the Holts to safety—his face had been etched in a permanent scowl. He wasn’t a harsh man; he even had a wry sense of humor. But he wasn’t overly prone to emotionally displays.

Which only made his expression now—the closest to hope Sam had seen in a long while—that much more startling.

Their newest ally, an Altean named Coran, who had let them shelter in this castle, stepped up behind Thace, his eyes wide. “Why—do you know this Ulaz fellow?”

“I do. He’s an ally. A friend.”

Sam breathed out a sigh of relief, loosening his hold on Matt as he did so. Shiro was safe. Shiro was _alive,_ and he was with friends. Sam wanted to weep. Perhaps sensing Sam’s release of tension, Matt’s restlessness calmed, his breathing settling into the shallow rhythm typical of his waking hours. He barely stirred, his eyes closed against the study’s bright lights, but Sam knew he was listening. He always listened, when he was awake.

“Can you find him?” Sam asked.

"I--" Thace hesitated. “I can try.”

* * *

Keith wasn’t waking up.

That thought was slow to penetrate Lance’s hazy mind. He still sat inside the circle on the floor of Keith and Pidge’s kitchen, Keith’s still, pale form beside him, something wet and viscous dotting both their clothes.

Why wasn’t Keith waking up?

While Lance was still processing the fact that Keith was lying there, his auras black through and through, with an unnatural oily sheen over top, Pidge was shouting. Shouting at—at Hunk?

Lance tore his eyes away from Keith and saw that, yes, Pidge was nearly as pale as Keith, and shaking, a bold streak of violet fear cutting through her auras, down to her very core. She towered over Hunk, trying for intimidation but falling far short.

“What did you _do_?”

Hunk had his hands up, shaking his head as he stumbled over an explanation. “No—nothing! I just—something happened—a darkness? I don’t know, man, but it was bad! And then Allura’s magic wasn’t working, so I—I had to, Pidge! I dumped the nullifying potion over you all to--”

“You _what?_ ”

Hunk glanced around for support, and Lance rose on weak legs. His head was still fuzzy, but if he knew one thing it was that Hunk had only been trying to help.

“A nullifying potion,” Lance said, staggering toward Pidge. His head still hurt, though at least he wasn’t seeing double anymore. “Ends the spell, banishes demonic energies… You know? Our backup plan?”

“Shit.”

Lance couldn’t tell if Pidge was swearing at him, or at Hunk, or at the situation in general. She turned, yanking a stained towel draped over the oven door handle, and collapsed beside Keith, frantically trying to dry him off.

Lance frowned. “What are you…?”

“You ended the spell with our minds still on Altea,” she said, and her voice was tinged with desperation. Her auras shivered with that same desperation, but there was more too it than that, something big and bright enough to hurt Lance’s eyes. Fear and guilt and echoes of some old hurt and other things Lance couldn’t sort through with his head like this.

“So…?”

She spun, glaring at him. “ _So_ , I think Keith’s mind might be stuck on the other side of a dead spell—and that’s if we’re _lucky_!”

She went back to toweling him off, only to abandon the effort after another two seconds. She threw the towel down and flung herself toward the counter, slamming against the drawers hard enough to rattle the silverware inside. She scrambled up onto the countertop, reaching for an upper cabinet and spewing a stream of curses harsh enough to make Lance flinch.

Snatching something from one of the shelves, she slid off the counter and rushed back to Keith’s side.

“Smelling salts?” Hunk asked.

Rather than answer, Pidge yanked the lid off the bottle and thrust the opening under Keith’s nose. He breathed in once, twice.

Then he spasmed, eyes flying open, and Pidge fell back with a cry, dropping the bottle and spilling smelling salts across the kitchen floor.

Color flooded back into Keith’s auras, but Lance didn’t have time to relax. Keith drew in a third, ragged, breath, and began to scream. White pulsed through his auras in regular waves, a soul-deep pain that tore at Lance even as Keith’s back arched up off the floor.

Pidge sat frozen for one instant, staring in horror at Keith, then scrambled forward. She swatted away one flailing hand and reached out, catching a silver chain looped around Keith’s neck. With a yank, she pulled out the pendant that had been tucked into Keith’s shirt—a plain circular disc, smooth and shiny.

Pidge’s eyes widened, and the fear in her auras deepened.

“What…?” Lance began.

Pidge was already on her feet, sprinting from the room so fast her socks slid on the carpet in the hallway. She slammed against the wall, grunted, and kept moving.

She reappeared five seconds later, a different silver chain dangling from her closed fist, and practically fell on top of Keith. She pressed this pendant into Keith’s palm, winding the chain around his wrist while reaching with her other hand for the pocket of his hoodie. It came out clutching Hunk’s herb pouch, which she flung across the room like a dead thing.

Keith sagged, gasping for air, pained whimpers escaping past clenched teeth. But at least he wasn’t screaming anymore, and the white flashes of pain in his auras were slowing, retreating beneath the muted grays—cut through here and there with brighter colors too jumbled up to name.

Pidge bent over Keith, and though both their faces were hidden from view, their auras said both of them were close to tears, high-strung with fire-bright emotions and a sudden, cutting exhaustion.

The near-silence echoed loud in Lance’s ears, but the spell Keith’s screams had wrought still held the room in an iron grip. Lance sat a few feet away, staring at the shuddering pair on the floor.

It was Allura who shattered the moment. “What the quiznak was _that?_ ”

Pidge tensed, and Keith said something too low for Lance to hear, his voice raw and scratchy. Ignoring him—or maybe egged on—Pidge spun, quicker than a striking snake. She had Keith’s silver knife in her hands, the tip aimed toward Allura, who had just stepped across the bounds of the circle.

Allura froze, Lance lurched to his feet, and Hunk scrambled back, shouting, “Woah! Pidge! What the heck?”

“Stay back!” Pidge shouted. “All of you just—just stay back.”

No one moved.

No one, that was, except Keith. He reached out one hand to grasp Pidge’s arm and then—slowly, grimacing as another curtain of white momentarily blotted out the rest of his auras—sat up. “ _Pidge,_ ” he said. “Stop. It’s too late for that.”

Tears welled up in Pidge’s eyes, but she didn’t let them fall. She rounded on Keith, her cheeks flushing. “No! Shut up, Keith! We can—we can still--”

He waited for her to run out of steam, or maybe he just didn’t have the energy to talk over her. A shiver wracked his body, and Pidge dropped the knife in her haste to reach out and steady him. “You really think we can wave this away?” he asked, looking over Pidge’s shoulder at Allura.

Pidge scowled. “It’s none of her business.”

“Not to butt in,” Lance said, “but I think at this point everything is everyone’s business. You can’t get mad at Hunk for whatever _this_ was when there’s obviously something more going on here.”

Keith looked back at him, his dark eyes steady, if pained. Pidge gave a pitiful whine of protest, but Keith just nodded, then pushed up the sleeve of his hoodie.

His right forearm was scarred, twisting lines curling around his wrist and nearly up to his elbow, glistening in a way that seemed to mimic the silver chain still wrapped around his wrist. Lance stiffened, his brain shutting down at the sight of it. The details were different, but in every other way it was just like the scar Lance had seen every day for the last year, carved into Mateo’s arm.

“That’s a Blessing,” Hunk said, his voice weak.

Keith barked out a laugh. “If you want to call it that.”

Allura dropped into a crouch, reaching out toward Keith’s arm—at least until Pidge stepped between them, scowling. Allura halted, but she seemed too dazed to be surprised. “That’s not just any Blessing. That’s a Bloodline.”

Keith looked up, his expression guarded. “A what?”

“A Bloodline.” Allura wetted her lips, staring at Keith like she’d never seen him before. “I don’t understand. This isn’t a magic we give to humans.”

“You mean people get mad when you inflict endless agony on them?” Keith asked dryly. “I never would have guessed.”

Allura scowled, opening her mouth to retort, but Lance stepped in. “Okay, hang on. You’re gonna have to back up. You’re _demon-touched_?”

Keith flinched, but nodded. “It's been... what? Ten months?”

“Eleven,” Pidge said.

Keith raised a hand, deferring to her memory. “I tried to summon a demon named Sendak.”

“That was the one we saw on Altea,” Lance said. Hunk made a questioning noise, and Lance flapped his hand at him. “In a minute.”

Keith blew out a long breath. His strength seemed to be returning, and he scooted away from Pidge, closing his eyes. “That’s him. This was before Pidge and I moved in together, and I—I wasn’t exactly as careful as I should have been. Sendak broke through my wards. Gave me this.” He held up his hand, then tugged the sleeve down to cover it.

“He managed to call my house, somehow,” Pidge said, jumping in when Keith hesitated a moment too long. “He could barely talk for the pain, but he managed to tell us what had happened. Kinda.”

Keith uncurled his fingers and revealed the pendant he held—a silver disc like the one dangling around his neck, only this one was etched with incredibly fine lines. “Pidge made me a talisman to help with the pain, and I moved on. Except when I went back to my classes at the Garrison...”

“Ah.” Allura smiled darkly, and both Keith and Pidge stiffened at the sight of it. “Well, that _is_ ironic.”

“What is?” Lance asked. He glanced at Hunk, glad someone else was as confused as him, then back at Keith. The jagged white scar through Keith’s auras, the one that corresponded to his expulsion from the Garrison, was on full display now, closer to the surface than Lance had ever seen it. It was with considerable hesitation that Lance asked, “Does that Blessing have something to do with why you left the Garrison?”

Keith snorted. “Left. That’s putting it nicely.” He planted his feet and pushed himself across the linoleum to the wall, where he slumped, all the fight gone out of him. “Yeah. I showed up to classes, but halfway through first period, I got called down to Iverson’s office. Turns out Sendak’s _Blessing_ tricked the wards into thinking I was a demon.”

“It’s no trick,” Allura said. “That’s a Bloodline crest. By the laws and magic of Altea, you _are_ a Galra now. Bloodlines can’t be undone.”

Keith stiffened, glaring at Allura so fiercely Lance half expected her to burst into flame.

“Wait...” Hunk leaned forward, his face pained, guilt stabbing storm-gray through his auras. “If you’re a Galra—if magic _thinks_ you’re a Galra,” he amended, when Pidge started toward him with murder in her eyes. “Then… my potion...”

“Tried to exorcise me?” Keith gave a feeble smile. “Yeah. Wouldn’t have been so bad if it didn’t wipe out Pidge’s talisman, too.”

“Thank god you’re always losing them,” Pidge muttered, the pastel yellow relief in her aura belying her surly tone. To Hunk she said, “I started making spares after the third time I came home to Keith writhing in agony on the floor. He keeps picking fights with assholes at the bus stop, and they keep breaking the chain. I swear, one of these days I'm gonna send you out there with this thing duct taped to your forehead.”

Lance was still trying to wrap his head around the whole situation. “So, wait. You got expelled because a demon tried to kill you.”

“He got off easy,” Pidge said. “Iverson thought he _was_ a demon disguising himself as human. He wanted to send him back to Altea, maybe experiment on him first. Lucky for him, my mom’s a lawyer and, like, _super_ terrifying when she’s pissed off.”

Keith’s lips twitched at that.

Pidge shrugged. “So, yeah. Long story short, Mom threatened to sue, Keith 'dropped out,' and Mom rented us this place so we didn’t leave evidence of our illegal activities lying around the house--”

“She still _lets_ you do this stuff?” Lance asked, incredulous, and Pidge snorted.

“Like she could stop me. No.” She waved her hand. “She knows better than to try that. As long as we check in with her once a day to let her know everything’s still fine, she promised to cover for us with the Garrison.”

Lance blew out a long breath. “Okay. So that’s… something.”

Keith watched him calmly, a faint current of unease distorting his auras. “If you want out, I understand.”

“Out?”

“Of this.” Keith gestured around. “I won’t stop you if you decide to leave.”

For a long moment, Lance said nothing. His eyes went to Keith’s arm—covered by his sleeve now, but that wasn’t enough to wipe the twisted lines out of Lance’s mind. _He needs you,_ Luz had said. And now Lance knew why. Not why he needed Lance, specifically, but damn it, this hit too close to home. How could Lance walk away when Keith and Pidge were in the exact same boat as Lance's family?

He glanced at Hunk, just to make sure they were on the same page. Hunk’s face and auras were all in agreement—he looked at Keith, and all Lance saw was concern. Empathy.

Lance smiled. “So what’s our next step?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone's interested, Shiro's (regular, non-improvised) deck is inspired by [these cards](http://hesomoge.com/bluebirdstarot).


	6. Registry of Demons

> _Every demon is unique. Their temperament, their strength, even to some extent their sorcery. Many demons specialize in one type of magic—healing, transportation, destructive, ect. Before the Turn, many summoners kept their own private records, as a close relationship with a particularly powerful demon could give them considerable advantage in the cutthroat world of summoners-for-hire._
> 
> _It is only in the last year that the Garrison has begun to compile its Registry of Demons, which groups demons by strength and specialty; ranks their predilection toward violence; and makes note of those who no longer respond to summons. The Registry now contains more than five thousand names, and yet it is widely accepted that the sorceries listed within represent only a very narrow sampling of demonic abilities._

\--From the Garrison School of Spellcraft’s _Handbook of Demonology,_ Chapter 6: “Registry of Demons”

* * *

“I’m going to have to go back,” Keith said.

“ _Back_?” Pidge squawked. It had been barely fifteen minutes since she’d woken up, disoriented, on the floor of her kitchen. She was tired, sore, and still jittery from the resurgence of Keith’s Bloodline. Keith getting all self-destructive on her was _not_ helping matters. “I’m sorry, did we just do the same ritual? Because I seem to recall finding nothing at all and almost getting skewered by Sendak.”

Keith’s smile was so blithely self-satisfied it almost managed to erase the lingering traces of pain on his face. “That was before I found your brother.”

"My..." Pidge faltered, fresh tears springing to her eyes. _Matt. He found Matt._ She could hardly breathe, but she launched herself across the kitchen floor toward Keith, grabbing him by the shoulders. "You found him? He's alive?"

Keith nodded, his eyes softening. "Matt and your dad. Shiro, too—he's not in the same city as them, but Matt's trying to get to him. They're—they're okay." He paused, giving Pidge a moment to absorb the news, which was appreciated. They were _alive._ She’d clung to that hope for a year, but there was a part of her (small and forcibly ignored) that had to wonder whether she was too late. "But I'll need to go back in. Find out where they are so we can go to them."

Pidge banished her relief at learning Matt and her dad were alive. ( _Later._ She could cry once she had them back here, _safe._ She needed to focus now.) "You almost _died_."

"Only because we ran into Sendak." Keith waved a hand. "I'll be fine, and we _need_ information."

Pidge opened her mouth to argue, then shut it again. She jabbed Keith in the knee. "If you die, Shiro will murder me."

Rolling his eyes, Keith kicked at her half-heartedly. "Yeah right. We all know you're Shiro's favorite."

“Uh-huh. Sure I am,” said Pidge. There was something to be said there about how Shiro had (illegally) taught Keith everything he’d learned from the Garrison when Keith was still basically a kid, but just then Pidge’s eyes fell on Lance, and she straightened. “Oh, right!” She stood, her movements stiff, and shuffled to the explosion of talismans-to-be in the corner of the living room.

It took a little digging to find the talisman she wanted—a thick cedar bangle inset with copper wire. The brain fog from Altea hadn’t fully released her (or maybe that was the late night catching up to her now that she didn’t have the benefit of adrenaline to keep her moving.)

She returned to the others, who were all still ranged around the kitchen in various states of exhaustion. Keith was trying to get up, but Hunk held him down as he cleaned a cut on Keith’s hand. He must have hit something--a forgotten knife, or the edge of the cabinets--in the midst of his thrashing around, though the whole ordeal was something of a panic-tinted blur to Pidge.

Pidge held her talisman out toward Lance, who was watching Hunk and Keith, brow furrowed. Pidge had to nudge him with her toe before he noticed her.

“For your brother,” Pidge said.

Lance stared at the bracelet, dumbstruck.

A few feet away, Keith was smiling wryly as he uncurled his fingers and turned his hand to show the pendant still sitting in the center of his palm. “You even got a free demonstration. Lucky you.”

Lance’s head whipped around, and he tried a few times to speak as Keith finally unwound the silver chain from his wrist and slipped it over his head. Pidge could make out small red crescents where his nails had bit into his palm. It was over now. Keith was fine. She had to remember that.

Apparently taking Lance’s silence for skepticism, Keith jutted his jaw out stubbornly. “Look, it’s not perfect, I know. I’ll be the first to admit that—but this talisman is the only thing that’s kept me functional this last year.”

“Huh.” Hunk stuck a band-aid over Keith’s cut, earning a bewildered frown from Keith, who never used band-aids (honestly, Pidge wasn't sure he'd ever seen one up close.) Hunk, oblivious, glanced at Pidge. “No wonder you were so sure you could make that charm work. You’ve had practice.”

Pidge smiled, lopsided and tired. “Yeah. The theory’s a little different. Different demon and all that. And Keith’s Touch never went bad; it’s just… _meant_ to hurt. But—what?”

Allura seemed surprised to be addressed, despite the fact that she’d been doing a decent impression of a thunderstorm in the corner, looming and grumbling under her breath.

“It’s nothing,” Allura said, but she changed her mind almost instantly and went on. “A Bloodline is _not_ as evil as you make it out to be. They’re our way of passing along protections and closely-guarded sorceries. They’re how we secure loyalties and alliances.” She pulled back her sleeve, revealing a lattice of pink markings on her forearm, the same color as the marks on her face. “The royal Bloodline is what protects my family against summonings.” She paused. “What _should_ protect us.”

Lance raised one thin eyebrow. “Uh, did _you_ see what just happened? With the screaming and the agony? That is not what I’d call a nice thing.”

“Well—no.” Allura huffed, scowling at the far wall. “Of course not. It’s not meant to be used on _humans_. He must be rejecting it or something.”

“You said there was a way to undo this,” Keith said, effectively silencing everyone else.

Allura lifted a single finger, the gesture almost timid. “Technically, I said there _wasn’t_ a way to undo it.”

Pidge glanced sideways at Lance. “That implies there’s a way to undo regular Blessings.”

Lance breathing in sharply, then all but launched himself at Allura. “Wait— _seriously_? You can—you can help Mateo?”

“I could,” Allura said, leaning slightly away from Lance. “Except that my sorcery isn’t working.”

Pidge frowned. “Since when?”

“Since she tried to pull you guys out of Altea,” Hunk said. “Or maybe sooner. I dunno, did you try to use it before that?”

Allura shook her head. “Not since I first arrived. It’s possible this is just another side effect of—of whatever made summoning stop working.”

Something about the way Allura paused snagged Pidge’s attention. She frowned, surveying Allura’s face. “You remembered something, didn’t you?”

Allura played dumb for a second, but it was obvious no one was buying it. With a sigh, Allura crumpled. “Yes. Zarkon—the Galra you’ve been searching for—he’s the one who led the campaign against humanity hundreds of years ago. My father, King Alfor, sealed him away with the help of five human witches.

“He broke free last year, slaughtered my people. He’s gathered allies from among the Galra, twisted the Bloodlines to compel others. He started a war, and we’ve been fighting ever since.”

“Compel?” Keith asked.

“So my father believes.” Allura shook her head. “I don’t see how it’s possible.”

Hunk breathed out heavily, leaning back on his hands. “So, do you remember how you ended up here? Was it Zarkon?”

Allura looked at him, her calm facade fracturing. “No. It was my father.”

This declaration was met with silence. Pidge stared at Keith, her mind rushing, trying to make the pieces fit together. “Your… father?”

Allura nodded. “He—he sensed your spell. Our Bloodline maintains the connection between Altea and Earth, and my father had his full attention turned toward Zarkon. Trying to predict his motions. Trying to find a way to stop him. Zarkon wanted to come to Earth, to conquer your world as well as our own. I think… I think my father saw what you were trying to do and redirected the spell onto me.”

“But… why?” Lance asked. “Why would he send you away?”

“Zarkon had surrounded our castle. I wanted to fight, but my father was certain Zarkon could not be defeated.” Allura faltered, wrapping her arms around her knees. She didn’t look very much like a princess now, Pidge thought. Or like a demon. “He was trying to protect me. And...”

“And?” Pidge asked hesitantly.

Allura closed her eyes. “It’s our Bloodline that maintains the link. That’s why we’re protected against summonings—if we were ever both removed from Altea, the link would fail, and Altea be cut off from your realm.” She paused, her shoulders tensing ever so slightly. “If we were both removed from Altea… or killed.”

Pidge stopped breathing. She stared at Allura, horrified, and was only vaguely aware of the others vocalizing their own surprise and sympathy. They’d all lost someone to Zarkon and this war of his, but Pidge and Keith’s families were still alive on Altea. Mateo could still be healed. But King Alfor…

Allura didn’t let the silence stretch far. She straightened, breathed in, and nodded. “How long will it take to complete the reverse summoning?”

“A few hours?” Pidge guessed, glancing at Hunk, who shrugged. “Hard to say.”

“That’s fine,” Keith said. “While you’re working, Lance and Allura can send me back in with the dream spell.”

Pidge frowned and flicked the side of Keith’s head. “Stop.”

Leaning away from Pidge, Keith scowled. “We need more information.”

“And _you_ need to rest.”

Keith opened his mouth to argue, but Lance was faster: “Okay, well, before any of this happens, _I_ need to go home.”

Keith whirled around. “ _What_?”

Lance held up Pidge’s talisman, his face hard and unyielding. “I’m not going to sit here for the rest of the day if I can go help my brother.”

Keith opened his mouth, then shut it. Family came first, even for him. Especially for him, maybe.

Hunk stood like he was going to leave with Lance, but Lance waved for him to stay. “I’ll be back soon.” He caught Pidge’s eye on his way out the door and glanced pointedly at Keith. “Make sure he rests, would ya?”

"You know it," Pidge said, and kicked the door shut behind him.

* * *

Lance stalled out at his front door, the talisman warm against his palm. His parents were at work now, Luz at school, so it was Val’s jeep in the driveway. She’d offered to take over for Lance watching Mateo while he dealt with the Allura situation. (Which at this point wasn’t an _Allura_ situation so much as an _oh my god do both worlds hate me?_ situation.)

Why did Keith have to be demon-touched? Luz’s words from her reading several days ago kept echoing in Lance’s head, an endless loop of psychic guilt trips. _He needs you._ No freaking duh Keith needed help—he was hurt, barely hanging on, trusting to a talisman to keep him moving, and yet everything he did was aimed at finding the Persephone Circle. Honestly, the boy needed to learn a thing or two about self-care.

Lance wanted to help—now more than ever, because seeing Keith’s Blessing had tugged at Lance’s brotherly instincts. He didn’t like to see Mateo suffer, and he didn’t like seeing Keith suffer. No matter how much of a jerk Keith was.

The only problem was that Lance didn’t know _how_ to help.

One problem at a time. Lance opened the door and called out a greeting as he kicked off his shoes. The TV was on, some news story about the failure of summonings, but Val stood at the kitchen sink, sipping a glass of water and staring at him with one eyebrow raised.

“I was wondering how long you were gonna stand out there.”

Her words were dry, but there was an undercurrent of concern in her auras. No doubt she could see Lance’s conflicted feelings in the air around him; her brow pinched, and her auras stretched out toward him curiously, unfolding lazily like a cat swishing its tail. Lance could have shut the lid on his emotions, but he knew better than to hope that would quell Val.

So he let them play out for her to see: his guilt, his anxious jitters, the hope he was trying to keep under wraps. He trusted Pidge’s work (more than ever after seeing its effect on Keith) but he’d been searching for a way to help Mateo for far too long to let go of his pessimism just yet.

“Is that a talisman?” Val asked. Her auras had begun to mirror Lance’s, the same cautious hope, the same shiver of anticipation. She stared at him, and Lance managed a smile.

“Mateo sleeping?” he asked, and hardly waited for Val’s nod before heading upstairs. Val trailed along behind him, her unasked questions big enough that he could feel them plucking at the back of his neck. He ignored them, his mouth too dry to speak as he knocked softly on Mateo’s door and pushed it open.

Mateo was awake, one arm flung across his eyes, his nose wrinkled as he groped for the tissue box on his bedside table. His auras were, as usual, damp and dreary, so full of a grayish malaise it was hard to make out anything else. He peered at Lance from underneath his elbow, coughed once, and said, “I thought you were working today.”

Lance grinned. “Not exactly. Here. Put this on.”

Lance sat on the edge of Mateo’s bed and held out the talisman. Mateo gave it a critical glance as he blew his nose. A coughing fit interrupted him halfway through, violent enough that it left him clutching his side, and Lance’s grin faded. He put a hand to Mateo’s forehead (clammy and slick with sweat, as always), then tucked Mateo’s hair behind his ear.

Rolling his eyes, Mateo combed his own fingers through his hair. “’m _fine_ , Lance,” he muttered. “It’s not even that bad today.”

Which, Lance had to admit, was true. On a bad day, Mateo never roused enough to hold a conversation, or he spent an hour bent over the toilet and the rest of the day with his blankets over his head, or he begged his parents to let him go to school, insisting he had a project due in a class he’d taken the previous year.

“Even your good days aren’t really _good_ ,” Lance muttered, shushing Mateo before he could argue. He nudged the back of Mateo’s hand with the talisman. “This will help.”

“What is it?” Val asked. She lingered in the doorway, her face as grim as her auras, the twining silver thread of curiosity a bright point in her presence. “What’s it do?”

“It’s a talisman,” Lance said. “A friend made one like it for her other friend. He has a Blessing, too, and it’s really helped him.”

Understanding flickered through Val’s auras--probably she understood this friend to be Pidge from what Lance had told her about summoning Allura--and a little flock of questions popped like fireworks around her head. She kept quiet, though, and Lance turned back to Mateo, helping him slip the bracelet over his hand. It looked thicker than ever against Mateo’s bony wrist, but it sent a shiver through Mateo’s auras. Lance was reminded of the oily black that had washed over Keith when he was caught in the scouting spell, the way his auras had shuddered, writhing with black and violet until Pidge found the new talisman.

This was something like that, if not so intense. Mateo’s Blessing wasn’t putting out that oily darkness. If anything, there seemed to be a void around it, and the talisman filled that space with something soft and milky. It looked like a scar in Mateo’s auras—but an old scar, well-healed.

Mateo stared at the bracelet, shook his hand gently, then said, “Huh.”

“Feeling better?” Lance asked, nearly choking on emotion.

Mateo thought about it for a second, breathed in through his nose—noisy and wet and ending abruptly in a cough—then shrugged. “I guess? I’m kinda hungry.”

Lance would take it. Mateo’s appetite had been finicky at best for the last year, to the point that Lance and his parents often had to coax him into eating anything at all. Lance ruffled Mateo’s hair (earning an indignant pout) and headed for the door. “Grilled cheese or chicken noodle soup?”

It was Val’s widened eyes more than anything that alerted Lance. Val's expression, a whisper of fabric, a faintly creaking floorboard.

Lance turned and found Mateo shuffling after him. He yawned, rubbing his eyes, and gave Lance a tired smile. “Can I help?”

All Lance could do was nod, feeling numb. It wasn’t like Mateo had _never_ left his room since the Turn. It was just rare. He made it down to dinner two or three times a week, maybe spent an afternoon passed out on the couch from time to time. Aside from that, Mateo rarely ventured farther than the bathroom at the end of the hall.

Lance and Val exchanged stunned glances over Mateo’s head—but only until Mateo elbowed Lance in the side and headed for the stairs. That was enough to snap Lance out of his shock, and he hovered near Mateo the whole way down the stairs, more than a little afraid Mateo was going to collapse.

But Mateo just grumbled and picked up the pace, acting more like a whiny teenager than Lance would have thought possible. He was smiling by the time they reached the kitchen, and the two of them spent the next fifteen minutes fighting over the spatula as Lance made them all grilled cheese. Val sat on the counter behind them, grinning a teary-eyed grin that radiated outward and wormed its way into Lance’s auras.

They watched a movie as they ate, a cheesy action flick they’d all seen a dozen times before. Mateo passed out on Lance’s shoulder halfway through, but he’d finished his lunch (and even nibbled on some saltines after the sandwich), and his aura was brighter than it had been in a long time.

Reluctantly, Lance eased out from under his brother and lowered him onto the couch cushions.

“You’re leaving?” Val asked, watching from the other side of the couch. She’d pulled Mateo’s feet onto her lap, one hand curled protectively around his ankle, and Lance was pretty sure that was the only thing keeping her seated.

With a shrug, Lance went to retrieve his shoes. “I’ve got a few more things to take care of,” he said evasively.

Val’s aura sharpened, acquiring a greenish hue of suspicion. “Demon-type things?” she guessed.

“I’ll be back later,” Lance said, ignoring Val’s question altogether. “Give me a call if anything changes.”

* * *

Shiro’s arm throbbed. An old magic stirred there, deep in his bones, growing stronger all the time.

“She’s close,” he gasped to Ulaz.

Voices whispered outside, a swarm of Galra soldiers. They’d been gathering through the night—keeping their distance at first, then pressing closer and closer as their numbers grew.

Ulaz’s face was grim. “We have to run.”

Shiro didn’t bother to respond, though there wasn’t exactly anywhere to run _to_. They were trapped inside the dilapidated building they’d taken shelter in, spells crackling at the doors and what remained of the windows. The first had been cast twenty minutes ago, the sound of it lighting Shiro’s nerves on fire as the bolt of energy hit the ceiling and left behind a spiderweb of fissures in the plaster. Ulaz had erected a shield before the assault began in earnest, but Shiro wasn’t sure how much more of a beating it could take.

A Galra threw itself against the barrier, shouting something unintelligible. Shiro’s head felt heavy—sleepless nights, the pain of Haggar’s spell on his arm, and now dark memories pounding at his skull. Memories of the experiments he’d endured. Claws digging into his arm. Empty yellow eyes watching him from outside his prison cell.

The barrier shrieked where a sword made contact, and a jolt of adrenaline rushed through Shiro. The pain in his arm crested, and a sickly purple light shone through the gap between his glove and the sleeve of his jacket. Snarling, Shiro clutched the arm closer to his chest.

“Use it,” Ulaz whispered.

Shiro looked up at him, wishing the room would stop spinning, wishing his vision would lose that reddish hue. “What?”

“The Blessing,” Ulaz said. He gestured impatiently at Shiro’s arm. “Haggar meant to create a weapon, didn’t she? Then use it. If you do, you might make it out of here.”

Shiro had to laugh at that. Haggar might have turned Shiro into a weapon, but that didn’t make him a warrior. He was a scholar. He’d learned basic self-defense at the Garrison, sure, but holding off a single demon long enough to trap or dismiss it was a far cry from cutting through a mob of them.

“What about you?” Shiro demanded.

“I’ll create a diversion, and--”

“No.” Shiro swallowed a cry of pain as his hand spasmed. The Galra were still beating at Ulaz’s barrier, his hand was throbbing ever-more-strongly as Haggar neared, and Shiro couldn’t see a way for them both to escape. But that didn’t matter. If he was the kind of person who could leave someone else behind to save his own skin, Haggar never would have gotten her claws in him to begin with.

But he hadn’t abandoned Matt to that monster, and he wasn’t going to leave Ulaz.

“Keith,” he whispered. He didn’t know if his brother was still there; the presence that had guided his last reading had disappeared shortly before the attack began, and Shiro hadn’t been able to connect with it again despite an hour of trying. The pain flared higher, and Shiro’s breath hitched. “Keith, if you can hear me…” He faltered, despair closing in around his throat. There was no way around it this time. He was going to die. “I’m sorry.”

* * *

Keith had barely landed on Altea when he felt something hook into him and _pull_.

His head was still swimming, an electric current pulsing outward from the scar on his arm, and the world bleeding to gray around him didn’t help anything.

Then he jerked to a stop two feet from Shiro’s back. He was crouched on the floor against the back wall of the same room he’d been in last time Keith was here, Ulaz kneeling a few feet away. Lightning crackled in a circle around the Galra, darting outward toward a translucent dome that butted up against the walls.

More Galra were hammering at the dome, some armed with a bizarre mix of swords and maces and what looked like guns, some with magic crackling in their hands.

Shiro gasped, pain tinging his voice, and Keith lurched forward.

“Shiro!”

“Keith.” Shiro’s voice was ragged, and for an instant, Keith thought he’d somehow heard Keith’s voice. But Shiro continued after drawing in a shaky breath. “If you can hear me, I… I’m sorry.”

Keith stilled, one hand stretched out toward Shiro. “Sorry? For what?”

As if in answer, Shiro stood and pulled off the glove he wore on his right hand. Purple light traced the veins there, gathering under the fingernails. The air around the hand seemed to warp, like the air around a fire, but that wasn’t what drew Keith’s eye.

The skin between those glowing purple veins was blackened, withered and split like a charred log. Keith’s stomach turned, and he stared at the back of Shiro’s head in horror. _What did they do to you?_

“Ulaz!” Shiro called. Ulaz turned, his face drawn, sweat tracing paths through the dirt on his skin. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not going down without a fight.”

For just an instant, Ulaz seemed not to register Shiro’s words. Then he smiled, small and pained, and stood. The barrier flickered out of existence, and Ulaz raised his hand toward the door, lightning gathering in the palm of his hand.

The room flashed white, stinging Keith’s eyes, and in the instant it took for him to recover, the scene descended into chaos. Shiro had gone to the windows, slamming his withered hand into Galra’s chests in the quick, forceful blows they’d learned at the Garrison. His hand pulsed violet with each hit, and the Galra he struck crumpled, some crying out in pain, others merely dropping like abandoned marionettes.

Ulaz stood in the center of the room, blasting any enemies who showed their faces. But he was already tired, and fading fast.

And Keith couldn’t do anything. Even if he’d had his ink and brush on him, he couldn’t affect the physical world as he was. He couldn’t have cast a spell, raised a ward, drawn a defensive circle—even if such a thing would have worked here.

_Matt._

Keith barely thought the name before he was skimming off again, the world stretching and pulling at the corners of his consciousness. The dream—if this was a dream—shot him out into a library he could only assume was at the palace where he’d found Matt before. Matt was there, pacing the outsides of the room. His eyes drooped, and he kept yawning, but he was awake.

The other three figures—Sam Holt, a Galra, and an Altean—sat around a table, diagrams spread out before them. They spoke to each other in low voices, Sam gesturing at one of the diagrams, the Altean nodding along, but Keith paid those three no mind. He needed Matt.

He needed Matt _asleep._

“Matt!” Keith shouted, knowing it was pointless, knowing Matt couldn’t hear Keith any better than Shiro could. Not like this. Not awake.

Desperate, Keith reached out to grab at Matt’s shoulder.

Matt stiffened under his touch, blurred. He crumpled to the ground, leaving an exact copy of himself standing, staring back at Keith.

“What just…?”

“Matt!” Sam cried. He lurched to his feet, knocking his chair over in his haste to cross to his son’s side.

Keith grimaced, pulling Matt away from the cluster of frantic men gathering around his unconscious body. “Oops.”

Matt sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “What did you _do_?”

“I don’t know. I just--” Keith shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Shiro’s in trouble.”

Matt was instantly attentive, his eyes sharp and flickering with concern. “Trouble?”

“Galra,” Keith said. “Enemies. They’re attacking him and Ulaz. Matt, I can’t—I can’t do anything.”

“Where is he? _Keith_ , where is he?” Matt shook him, hard. “We can get there—Coran can get us there—but we need to know _where_. I can’t find him, Keith, I don’t know why. It’s like something’s blocking me. I need you to tell me where he is.”

For a moment, Keith just stared at him, the gears in his mind grinding to a halt. Then he wrapped his hands around Matt’s wrists (a nauseating sensation, as Keith’s hands blurred and sank slightly _into_ Matt’s form) and thought of Shiro. The dream carried them both back to the shack. Shiro was still there, and Ulaz, both of them still fighting, fallen Galra piling up at the edges of the room.

Time seemed to have stopped, or at least slowed drastically. They stood in the center of a tableau—lightning creeping from Ulaz’s fingers toward a Galra sighting down the barrel of his rifle at Shiro; Shiro’s face a snarl of defiance as he grappled with a massive figure. The lines of purple fire on Shiro’s hand glowed more brightly now, stark against the decaying flesh around them.

Matt gasped at the sight, and swayed, then screwed his eyes shut, still gripping Keith’s shoulders. The room faded, and they were standing on the street outside. Keith’s eyes went at once to the ranks of Galra pressing toward the shack—too many for Shiro and Ulaz to fight off alone. And there, at the back of it all, a woman in a long black robe, her white hair lifted in the breeze.

She turned, achingly slowly. Keith swore she was turning toward _him._

“Farrax!” Matt cried.

Keith kept his eyes on the woman as he slowly pulled Matt away from her. “Farrax?”

“This city! We came through here with Thace a few months ago.” Matt swore, the sound altogether cheerier than Keith thought it had a right to be. “I need to get back. I need to tell them--”

He closed his eyes, breathing deep, and his form began to blur.

Keith yelped, letting go of him, and Matt chuckled. “Sorry,” he said. “This’ll only take a minute.”

Then he was gone, and it was just Keith standing there, staring down the creepy woman in the billowing robes. She _was_ staring at him, her yellow eyes boring straight into Keith’s. _Why_ was she staring at him? She gave off the uncomfortable impression that she could _see_ him, but that wasn’t possible… Was it?

Suddenly time began to flow more quickly. There was a commotion from the Galra pressed most closely against the crumbling house where Shiro and Ulaz had been hiding.

The woman turned, her face contorting in fury. “ _How?_ ” she shrieked, her voice rasping and dry. The Galra around her cringed.

Keith, though, ran forward, letting the strange motion of the dream carry him forward, into the building. Galra shifted around him, their unease a palpable thing. Signs of a battle still lingered—scorched marks on the ceiling and walls, blood on the floor, an electric charge in the air—but Shiro and Ulaz were gone.

* * *

Shiro stumbled as the ground beneath him changed. One moment he was inside his ramshackle shelter, fighting back to back with Ulaz, the enemy closing in around him. There had been a flash of light, a stranger’s voice in his ear.

Now he was here, unsteady from the sudden—teleportation? He fell, rolled, and came up in a defensive crouch, ready for a fight. Ready to--

“Shiro?”

Shiro froze, his brain failing to process what he was seeing. Sam Holt, standing beside an unfamiliar Galra who embraced Ulaz like an old friend. The man—the Altean—who had been standing behind Shiro crossed to stand beside Sam, smiling as he clapped him on the shoulder.

Someone small and wiry barreled into Shiro, knocking him flat. “Shiro!”

“Matt?”

Matt nodded against his chest, then pulled back, scowled, and whacked the side of Shiro’s head. “ _That’s_ for almost getting yourself killed— _twice._ ”

“More than twice,” Shiro muttered, which was probably the wrong thing to say. Matt’s face darkened, but the expression was ruined somewhat by a sudden, massive yawn.

Chuckling, Sam laid a hand on Matt’s back. “Okay, okay. Don’t overdo it, son.”

Matt’s face twisted up stubbornly, and Shiro finally, _finally_ let himself relax.

“You’re okay.”

Sam smiled, helping Shiro to his feet. “Thanks to you. Thace and Coran have been helping us.” He gestured to the two strangers. The Altean gave a cheery wave, but the Galra was caught up in a hushed argument with Ulaz.

Matt tried to stand, then fall back to the ground, his eyelids drooping. “Thace and Ulaz know each other,” he murmured, grinding the heel of his hand against his eyes. “’pparently.”

He seemed tired—too tired, Shiro thought, for someone who’d just charged across the room to tackle Shiro. He remembered when they’d first landed on Altea. Matt had stayed conscious for barely a few seconds before dropping.

Seeing him awake at all was more than Shiro had dared to hope for.

“How did you find me?”

“Keith,” Matt said, evidently deciding that was explanation enough. He yawned again, wavered, then scooted toward the wall and leaned back against it. Shiro turned to Sam.

“I’m not too clear on the details, but it sounds like Keith’s been digging through our notes.”

Shiro groaned. “Of course he is. Damn it, Keith.”

The hairs on the back of Shiro’s neck lifted, and he shivered. He almost—almost—passed it off as nothing more than his body coming down off an adrenaline high but then Matt, already half asleep, furrowed his brow and whispered, “Keith?”

Shiro spun, searching the empty air for his brother. “He’s here.”

“He…” Sam trailed off, and Shiro caught a frown on his face as he turned. “Keith?”

Matt roused a little at that. “I can talk to him,” he said. “If I dream.”

“That’s not a good idea,” Sam said at once, going to where Matt lay slumped against the wall and shaking him gently. “Matt? Matt, wake up. You need to stay awake, Matt. Remember?”

Matt grunted, but his eyes fluttered. Questions gathered on the tip of Shiro’s tongue, but he held himself back from asking them—what was wrong with Matt? Why was he so tired? Why didn’t Sam want him to go to sleep?

All that could wait.

“It’s fine, Matt,” Shiro said, pulling out his tattered tarot deck and kneeling on the floor. “We worked out a system.”

He hastily shuffled his deck as Sam filled him in on the bare bones of the last year—Thace sheltering Sam and Matt as they fled Zarkon’s army, finding Coran and taking refuge in the castle. Keith making contact with Matt twice and guiding them to Shiro so Coran could use his sorcery to bring them back here.

Eventually Sam fell silent, and Shiro was left kneeling with his tarot cards and a million unanswered questions. Well, he had to start somewhere. “Keith, if you’re here, let me know.”

He thumbed through the deck until a card caught his finger, then cut the deck and flipped over the Fool—inverted, just to drive the point home.

Shiro stared at the card, then up at empty space, unamused.

Keith must have seen Shiro’s battle in Farrax—or at least enough of it to realize that Shiro had fought expecting to die. Shiro might have felt guilty for it, except that Keith’s card choice stared up at him in silent mockery. There was no deep meaning here, no symbolism or wisdom like Shiro might normally expect from a reading; Keith was just being a brat.

“What’s it mean?” Sam asked.

Shiro snorted. “It means Keith thinks I’m an idiot,” Shiro said, and he could almost hear Keith’s laughter. Shiro clung to his irritation for a moment, then shook his head, letting a smile slip out. “It’s… It’s been a while. How are you holding up?”

He ran through the deck again, and flipped over the Wheel of Fortune, also inverted. Shiro’s heart clenched, but he couldn’t say he was surprised. Bad luck, a lack of control… Shiro had known, on some level, that his disappearance would have put Keith into a downward spiral.

Shiro was thumbing through the deck again before he realized what he was doing, but he relaxed and let Keith pick another card. It was the Three of Swords this time, and an image of the real card flashed through Shiro’s mind—a heart run through by three swords. Grief. Sorrow. Heartbreak.

“I’m sorry, Keith,” Shiro whispered. “I didn’t mean to leave you.”

He felt a nudge, like Keith was trying to connect with him, urging him to draw another card. Shiro suspected he knew what Keith wanted. _It’s not your fault, Takashi. I don’t blame you._ Shiro ignored the urge and asked another question.

“If you’re still here, it must be because you have something to say. So… what is it? What do you want to tell me?”

It was a vague question, but it was the best Shiro could do. He didn’t know what Keith had been up to since the disaster that had stranded Shiro and the others here. He didn’t know how or why Keith was here at all, communicating with him like this. He’d just have to trust Keith to get his point across, one way or another.

The first card this time was the Page of Swords. Pidge’s card. Sam perked up at the sight of it, and even Matt lifted his head as Shiro’s hand went back to the deck and drew Temperance.

“He’s with Pidge,” Shiro said, trying to make himself think like Keith. This wasn’t like his usual readings, which fed on Shiro’s own intuition. A spread might mean one thing to Shiro and something else coming from Keith—but Shiro knew Keith better than anyone. A year apart might have made him rusty, but it couldn’t sever their connection entirely. “I think they have a plan.” He paused, shuffling again. “What do you need from us?”

The Empress, inverted.

Shiro frowned, momentarily perplexed. Usually when the Empress turned up inverted in his reading, it signified a block of some kind—and it had turned up more than once these last few weeks as he tried reading after reading with Ulaz watching over his shoulder. This card was an expression of his own frustration, his inability to connect properly with his psychic gifts and understand what the cards were saying.

It took him only a moment to realize what else the inverted Empress might mean.

_You can’t do this yourself. Trust me._

“Okay,” Shiro said, emotion making his voice small. “Okay.”

A distant roar reached Shiro’s ears, and he turned, alarmed, as Thace ran for the balcony. His eyes widened, and he turned back to Shiro. “Whatever your friend is planning,” he said, “tell him to hurry. It looks like Zarkon’s decided to storm the castle.”


	7. Sorcery

> _Human spellcraft and demonic sorcery may appear similar on the surface, but they rely on very different underlying principles. Spellcraft is a ritual-based art, dependent upon drawn circles, spoken words, or the magic inherent in nature. Anyone can perform spellcraft with the proper training._
> 
> _Sorcery, in contrast, is an inherent talent. A demon is born with sorcery, and while they can grow their abilities, they cannot train in a vein of magic they do not already posses. Sorcery is also a willful art, requiring no circle or spell, merely a focus and an outpouring of energy—what the demons call Quintessence._
> 
> _What, then, are the psychic gifts? Like sorcery, they are innate and require no ritual except in the case of a tarot reading (though some maintain that tarot cards function merely as a way to translate a gift that works on a subconscious level.) Many believe psychic gifts are a manifestation of Altean energies in human bodies, a hybrid magic of sorts, but it remains to this day one of the supernatural’s greatest enigmas._

\--From the Garrison School of Spellcraft’s _Handbook of Demonology,_ Chapter 7: “Sorcery”

* * *

Keith wrenched himself free of the vision. It was a battle, a battle against Altea itself, which seemed to cling to him. He wished he’d figured out a way to signal the others when he was ready to be pulled back, but he hadn’t figured things would get urgent.

Zarkon was attacking the castle.

Shiro was in trouble.

So Keith fought. After everything he’d done to find his brother, all the risks he’d taken, everything he’d given up, he wasn’t going to lose Shiro _now_. He clawed at the dream, thinking of Earth, willing himself to move across the Veil the way he could will himself across Altea.

Suddenly the hairs stood up on the back of his neck. He spun, expecting to see Sendak, or the white-haired witch who’d led the attack against Shiro and Ulaz. But there was nothing. Just an empty balcony and the sky beyond, burning orange and violet with the sunset.

The tingling along Keith’s spine intensified, and then there was a lurch, and Keith was lying on his kitchen floor, his friends crowded around him.

“Sorry!” Lance cried, hands up in a defensive gesture. “Sorry. I’m sorry. Your aura—you looked like you were panicking, so I ended the ritual. I didn’t--”

“It’s fine,” Keith said, sitting up. He was halfway to his feet before he realized how his brusque dismissal might sound. Then he paused, kneeling on one knee, gripping the back of the kitchen chair, ice still clinging to his skin, and turned to give Lance a nod. “Thanks.”

Lance blinked, then frowned, but danger still sang in Keith’s blood. A simple thanks was going to have to be enough for now.

“I hope you guys are done with that other ritual,” Keith said, turning toward Pidge.

Pidge nodded, unease in her eyes. “We’ve got a few things to double-check, but other than that--”

“Skip it.”

The others stilled. Allura’s brow was furrowed, Hunk’s jaw slack. Lance picked himself up off the floor slowly, glancing around at the others like he wasn’t sure he’d heard Keith right. Keith squirmed under their combined scrutiny, then forced himself to stand firm.

Pidge was the first to recover, shaking her head vigorously and holding a finger to Keith’s lips before he could explain. “Something happened,” she said.

Keith nodded. “Zarkon’s launched an attack.”

“An attack?” Allura demanded. “Where? On whom?”

“I don’t know—a castle? I couldn’t exactly Google Maps it!” Keith spun, searching for the ink and brush he’d set aside after completing the second scouting circle. “Shiro’s there, and Pidge’s family, and—and—” He was blanking on the names of the demons who were there, though he knew he’d heard them all at least once. “They’re in trouble. We need to go. _Now._ Where’s the diagram, Pidge?”

She hesitated for just another fraction of a second, then darted to her desk and grabbed her notes. Hunk followed, and the two of them shooed the others away as they got to work on a clean section of the floor. The first few lines looked like the scouting ritual, but the longer they drew, the more complex it became.

It took ten minutes. Ten agonizing minutes while Keith paced the edge of the room, earning himself dirty looks from Pidge until Lance grabbed Keith by the shoulders and steered him toward the couch.

Then it was done. The finished product looked nothing like any magic circle Keith had ever seen, though he could pick out some of the logic behind the design. It wasn’t what he’d found burned into the floorboards at his old apartment, either, but this was Pidge’s work. When Pidge said something worked a certain way, it always did.

She sat back on her heels, eyes roving over her work. She looked up at Hunk, then both turned toward the three waiting a few paces away.

“It’s done.” Pidge tossed her brush aside, lifted her glasses, and rubbed her eyes. “Last chance to back out.”

Keith stepped forward, not even hesitating as he crossed into the circle. Allura was close behind him, and Lance hesitated for only a moment before joining them.

“Okay then,” said Pidge. “Here we go.”

* * *

Takashi Shirogane was an adaptable man. He always had been, and he prided himself on it. He’d trained at the Garrison School of Witchcraft as a containment specialist—more commonly known as a Hunter. He’d learned to neutralize out-of-control spells and exorcise demons who had turned violent.

When he’d realized the job of Hunter more often turned to harrassing independent demonologists in order to ensure Iverson and his people remained at the top of the field, though, he’d quit, trading field work for an archivist’s job at the local university. There he’d met Matt, who introduced him to Sam, who invited Shiro to join their research team.

And now here he was, unknown sorcery rotting his arm, about to the charge into battle against an army of demons.

From what Coran said, the castle defenses had held off Zarkon’s forces for close to a week, and might have gone on doing so indefinitely if Zarkon hadn’t showed up with Haggar, his second-in-command. As it was, they’d had just a few minutes to prepare, Ulaz raising defensive wards around the archives, Thace disappearing for a time to set traps for the advancing soldiers.

Coran and Sam shoved the table on which they’d piled countless books, notepads, and leather-bound journals to the side of the room, then began to draw a magic circle.

“What are you doing?” Shiro demanded, helping Matt to the back of the room, where chairs and bookshelves might shelter him if the fight reached the door. He protested, but only weakly; he seemed only half awake, and Shiro wouldn’t have asked him to fight even if he _could_ stand.

“The sealing ritual!” Coran cried. “It’s the only thing we’ve got that can stop Zarkon.”

“The one that needs five _humans_?” Ulaz demanded.

Sam grimaced. “We did just establish that Keith has access to my notes, didn’t we?” he said, and let the implication hang.

Shiro gaped at him. “You can’t possibly _want_ Keith and Pidge to come here. _Here_.”

“Oh, like you could stop them,” Matt muttered. His eyes were glassy and half-lidded, but his mouth quirked into a smile. “If they know how to get here, they’re getting here.”

“Better to be ready for them,” Sam finished.

Shiro might have argued further, but just then Thace returned. “They’re coming,” he said, and knelt beside Ulaz, driving his knife into the floor. Black flames licked the blade, snaking out toward the door in shivering lines.

Seconds later Shiro heard them: dozens of feet. Hundreds. All marching toward them. An explosion shook the building, and Thace closed his eyes. Shiro could only hope the explosion had been one of his traps, but Thace didn’t seem happy about it, or even merely satisfied. If anything, the explosion—and the ones that followed—seemed to weigh him down.

Shiro left Matt in his hiding spot and ran forward to join Thace and Ulaz. Tentatively he reached out for the sorcery lying dormant in his arm, the weapon Haggar had forced on him during her experimentation. His stomach churned at the thought of it, reawakening the aches he could ignore most of the time.

When the door burst open, Thace’s flames were the first to greet the attackers, but Shiro was close behind, focusing Haggar’s magic into small bursts of raw energy. He’d heard it called Quintessence, and though he didn’t know how it worked, the effects were clear enough to see. Shiro’s attacks left no physical marks, but they threw Galra soldiers backward with enough force to knock them unconscious. If Shiro managed to hit the heart, or the head, they didn’t survive even that long.

The battle had only just begun when a chill wind swept through the room, raising the hairs on the back of Shiro’s neck. A pang of homesickness hit him hard, his vision blurring with unexpected tears before he’d even recognized the chill and the wind as signs of a summoning.

“ _Shiro!_ ”

The voice shattered the expectant silence and froze Shiro in place. His last opponent fell, but two more were already coming to take his place.

Before Shiro could make himself move, a smaller figure darted in front of him—a flash of silver, a spurt of blood.

Keith spun, his knife dripping blood on the tiled floor and making little gruesome constellations. Funny, how that was where Shiro’s attention landed, when his brother was standing in front of him for the first time in a year. He turned his gaze, and looked Keith in the eye. He was older than Shiro remembered, and taller, and his face was creased with worry lines Shiro didn’t recognize.

Breathless, Keith stared back at him, and for an instant he seemed as stunned as Shiro. Then his face crumpled, tears springing to his eyes, and he flung himself at Shiro.

A Galra moved behind Keith, taking aim with his rifle at Keith’s exposed back.

Fury unfroze Shiro’s limbs. He shoved Keith aside just as the soldier fired, then charged forward, arm pulled back in preparation for a strike. The Galra took aim at him, then gave a start, his head whipping to the side as though someone had called his name. Shiro didn’t pause to wonder, just sprinted the last three steps and struck the demon in the chest. He fell, gun clattering to the ground.

Funny, how demons died just as easily as humans.

A wall of crackling electricity swept between Shiro and the rest of the army. He spun, catching Ulaz’s eye. The man smiled, then nodded toward Keith, who’d sprawled across a heap of discarded books, looking more than a little dazed.

Shiro smiled, the pain in his arm receding just a little, and went to help him up.

“Iverson must be going soft if he never even taught you a proper stance,” Shiro said.

Keith blinked at him, then chuckled. “It’s good to see you, Takashi.”

“You too. More than you know.” Keith’s eyes flickered to Shiro’s arm and, stomach churning, Shiro turned back to the army at the door. “Ready for the fight of your life?”

Keith grinned, and though the expression looked strained, he managed to inject his voice with a measure of confidence. “You know it.”

* * *

Matt dreamed.

He was not in his body when the battle started, and however hard he tried to wake himself up his mind stayed stubbornly untethered. He told himself it was a good thing; better to be alert when sorcery was flying thick and fast.

Alert and useless.

He’d seen Zarkon’s soldiers many times in the last year, but never so many in one place, and never so heavily armed. They bore a strange collection of weapons, from swords to shotguns to—were those _laser_ guns? It was like the soldiers had each been plucked out of a different point in Earth’s history, or maybe her future.

But however dangerous the army was, Coran had been certain the castle could hold them out forever. It was Zarkon who’d broken through the shield. It was Zarkon slowly making his way toward the refugees hidden in the archives.

No sooner had Matt thought about Zarkon than the world around him shifted. He found himself standing in the castle’s entry hall. The grand staircase opposite the doors had collapsed, black flames licking the wreckage—and the dead bodies piled within. Thace’s work, Matt supposed. He barely had time to notice it.

Matt had never seen Zarkon before, but he recognized the man instantly. Taller than any of the other soldiers by several inches, Zarkon visibly radiated power. It warped the air around him, darkening the blood-red paint on his armor. Haggar stood beside him, far less imposing than he was except for the lightning crackling around her fingers. Even in the dream it raised the hairs on Matt’s arms.

She turned her head to stare directly at Matt.

Instantly, Matt was back in the archives, shaken and cold. He stumbled back, trying to get a grip on his emotions—and caught sight of Shiro and… _Keith_?

Matt’s first thought was that Keith was dreaming again, but he had his knife out, dripping violet blood. He turned toward Shiro, and both seemed on the verge of tears.

It was Shiro who saw the Galra rifleman take aim at Keith’s back, but while Shiro stayed to push Keith out of the bullet’s path, Matt charged the soldier. The dream skipped, and Matt stood in front of the man; he didn’t slow as he saw the man adjust his aim—adjust it toward Shiro, who roared in fury as he approached.

He wouldn’t be fast enough.

Desperate, Matt hurled himself at the rifleman, hoping beyond hope he could somehow knock the gun aside just enough to save Shiro.

Instead, he passed straight through the man and stumbled to a stop on the other side. Matt spun and saw the Galra stiffen, whipping his head around to stare at Matt. _Through_ him. Matt didn’t think the Galra could see him, or even knew he was there, but he’d _felt_ something.

Shiro struck the man in the chest, and he fell, but Matt was already spinning toward the remaining forces, the gears in his mind turning. He was basically a ghost here, insubstantial but palpable where he touched someone in the waking world. He couldn’t hurt them, but he could distract them.

He was going to haunt the shit out of this army.

* * *

“ _Dad!_ ”

Lance blinked to clear his vision as Pidge sprinted toward one of the two men kneeling on the floor, away from the fighting. The man looked up, his auras bursting with shock and joy so vivid they hurt Lance’s eyes in the instant before Pidge arrived, crashing into him and knocking them both to the floor. She clung to him, her aura pulsing a deep, steady blue with relief, and the man—her father—stared at the top of her head in utter shock.

“Katie?” he asked. “Is that really you?”

A sudden shiver in the air wrenched Lance’s eyes away from them and back toward the battle, where Keith and a taller dark-haired man, presumably his brother, fought the Galra.

For a moment, Lance was overwhelmed by the scene. It was just so... _much_. Keith and Shiro’s auras sharpened with determination, sorcery lit up the air with lightning and fire and creeping shadows. More than that, though, was a kind of _sheen_ over the top of everything, like an oil slick on the water. It was the same thing he’d seen in the scouting ritual, the thing that had made the world look like an out-of-focus 3D movie—but now it _was_ focused, so it no longer hurt Lance’s eyes (though it did hurt his brain a little.) It still felt like he was only seeing the surface layer of something that ran much deeper.

He caught sight of Allura, standing ahead of Lance next to Hunk. But where Hunk was overawed by the castle and the battle and maybe just the fact that they were all standing in the demonic world (how was _that_ for trippy?), Allura seemed more relaxed than she had since Lance had known her.

He followed her gaze to the other man kneeling in the half-finished magic circle, the Altean. He smiled, a little tearfully, and Allura had to blink rapidly to keep from doing the same. The air around the both of them rippled with an iridescent shimmer, clearer when Lance looked at it in his periphery than when he looked head-on. It was almost like an aura—but no aura Lance had ever seen.

Whatever the case, he didn’t have long to contemplate it. Allura turned, bolts of lightning like daggers appearing in her hands, and charged into battle.

“Hunk!” Pidge called. “Help us finish this circle.”

Lance turned, still a little dazed by the overwhelming atmosphere of Altea, and watched as Sam Holt showed Hunk and Pidge a diagram and handed them each a piece of chalk. They got to work, and Lance shook himself, turning in search of some kind of weapon. It was all well and good Keith had that silver knife of his (the guy probably slept with it) but there had been no time for the rest of them to go out and buy their own weapons.

So Lance had to settle for ripping the leg off an overturned chair nearby. He hoped Allura wasn’t too mad at him for destroying her stuff, but, well, that was where they were right now.

Lance hung back from the main battle, figuring his little club wouldn’t add enough brute force to the mix to justify jumping in among all that magic. Instead, Lance took up position just in front of the magic circle, ready to beat back any Galra who made it past the first line of defense.

It took him a few moments to notice the figure darting in among the enemy—invisible and, as far as Lance could tell, intangible; distinguishable only by its auras. His first thought, in all honesty, was _haunted castle_ , except that demon ghosts, like all demons, probably wouldn’t have auras.

Whatever. The ghost seemed to be friendly, or at least only distracted the enemy, blurring through soldiers as they took aim at Shiro and Keith, disrupting those who were trying to channel their own sorcery. That was good enough for Lance.

The air rippled, distorting Lance’s view of the room like his sight was a pond and someone had just chucked in a bunch of rocks. He staggered, catching himself on a nearby bookshelf, and heard Hunk calling his name. He couldn’t answer, though. The room was going dark, shadows pooling in the hallway.

Something was coming.

He had only enough time to shout, “Watch out!”

Then Zarkon was there, a massive, menacing figure wreathed in blackness so deep Lance could hardly make out the features beneath. The woman beside him was nearly as bad, though instead of darkness she just had that iridescent oiliness cranked up to a hundred until it looked like she’d taken a bath in a tub full of liquefied beetle shells.

The Galra they’d run into in the plaza, Sendak, stood beside the other two, grinning as his one-eyed gaze fell on Keith, and Lance felt a creeping horror take up residence at the base of his spine.

The stillness of the moment was ruined by Allura, who screamed Zarkon’s name, gathering electricity between her hands. She unleashed it, and the room flashed to white.

* * *

Keith’s world narrowed to Sendak. Allura had taken on Zarkon, Shiro was trying (and failing, mostly) to get close to Haggar, and Ulaz and Thace were left to deal with the rest of the army.

Keith paid attention to them only enough to be sure there were no other threats sneaking up behind him. Sendak sneered at him, purple energy rising in wisps from his arm, and Keith’s Bloodline twinged with remembered pain. He wanted a ward between him and Sendak. He wanted a knife in Sendak’s chest.

But he waited, forcing himself to breathe. Rushing into things was what had allowed Sendak to break through the wards and mark him in the first place.

Sendak moved, faster than sight, his claws blazing violet as they shot toward Keith’s chest--

Keith blinked, already moving backwards even as Sendak began his attack again. (Again?) The glowing purple claws moved in the same path, nearly too fast to follow, splitting the air where Keith had been an instant before. Sendak seemed shocked his attack had missed its target—nearly as shocked as Keith himself.

_What was that?_

There was no time to figure it out. Sendak recovered quickly from his shock and struck again, but Keith was already moving. His physical training at the Garrison had taught him to be light on his feet, but he’d never trained in actual combat. Oh, there were a few karate lessons from his childhood, and a lifetime of roughhousing with Shiro, but nothing that prepared him for an honest-to-god life-and-death fight.

Sendak swung for Keith’s face, and even as Keith scrambled back, the world hit another little hiccup, like a skipping record, and reset. Just an instant, just the sliver of time between life and death, but it saved Keith’s life again, and again Sendak seemed infuriated by Keith’s reflexes.

It was on the third repetition—this time showing Keith himself, tripping over a discarded book and giving Sendak a chance to stab him in the heart—that Keith realized what was happening: visions.

They weren’t normal visions, or at least not normal for Keith. He more often saw the past than the future, and his visions were normally much longer than this. They also normally left him off-kilter for far longer—long enough that having a vision in a fight like this would have been far more likely to _get_ him killed than to save his life.

Ordinarily.

But ordinarily, Matt’s dreams weren’t simple out-of-body experiences. Ordinarily, Shiro didn’t have trouble making sense of his spreads.

Was it possible psychic gifts manifested differently on Altea than they did on Earth?

It was a question for another day, a question better left to someone like Pidge, who knew the theory far better than Keith did. All that mattered was that Keith seemed to be getting warnings of things that should have killed him. So he stopped worrying about the hows and whys and started listening to what the visions were trying to tell him.

If nothing else, it pissed Sendak off to no end. He swung, Keith dodged, and the scowl on Sendak’s face became even more of a trench. Keith led him around the room, darting strikes whenever he dared. Sometimes they landed, sometimes not. He never managed anything better than a gash across Sendak’s bicep that left the man howling.

Allura cried out suddenly as a flash of reddish light sent her slamming into the wall. Lance shouted her name.

“Sendak,” Zarkon said, his voice a sliver of ice sliding beneath Keith’s skin. “Enough of this farce. You didn’t claim him for nothing.”

Keith heard Shiro’s questions, and Pidge’s torrent of curses, but both came to him through mufflers. All he saw was Sendak’s smile, all sharp fangs and satisfaction. He stepped back, the light around his arm snuffing out. He shook back his sleeve and revealed a mark, lavender lines a near-perfect match to the scar on Keith’s arm.

Sendak held the arm out toward Zarkon, who reached out one finger to touch it.

Dread crept into the pit of Keith’s stomach a split-second before his Bloodline suddenly blazed with light.

His body locked up, bones and muscles freezing in place for an instant, as if Keith had been encased in stone. His thoughts began to race toward a grisly end, certain Zarkon was somehow about to kill him through the Blessing. It took him a second to realize mobility had returned to his body.

It took a moment longer to realize _he_ wasn’t the one in control.

Keith turned his back on Sendak, panic rising as his feet resisted his command to stop. He opened his mouth to cry out, to demand an explanation—but his mouth wouldn’t open. He was trapped inside his own body, helpless to do anything but watch as Zarkon turned him.

Turned him toward Shiro, who still fought Haggar. With his back toward Keith, Shiro couldn’t see him coming, couldn’t see him raising his silver knife in preparation to strike--

Panic clawed at Keith’s throat, a rising tide he thought would drown him if he couldn’t fight his way free. He couldn’t stop it. He wasn’t strong enough. He was going to kill Shiro, and Shiro wouldn’t even know it hadn’t been Keith who struck the fatal blow.

“ _No!_ ”

Pain exploded in Keith’s hand, hotter than a coal and throbbing in time with his pulse. The dagger flew out of his hand and buried itself in the cover of a book near the half-finished magic circle, and Keith’s body turned toward his attacker. Toward _Lance_ , who stood there wide-eyed, a splintered chair leg in his hands. There was a commotion among the others, but Keith’s attention was fixed on Lance, on the sharp-eyed gaze that seemed to stare right into Keith’s soul.

“Lance, what the fuck?!” Pidge cried. “Why are you fighting _Keith_?”

“That’s not Keith,” Lance said, sounding numb. “Zarkon and Sendak—they did something to him. I think… I think they’re controlling him.”

Keith felt his mouth open, and a voice that sounded exactly like his own came out. “Are you stupid or something? How the hell would they _control_ me?”

“I don’t know,” Lance said. “All I know is Keith’s panicking, and it’s really pissing me off.”

Comprehension flooded Keith in the same instant as relief. _Auras._ Lance could read auras.

A smile tugged at Lance’s lips. “You’re right, Mullet. You _are_ lucky I’m here.”

Keith couldn’t have argued with that, even if he’d been able to speak.

“Wait, hold on.” Keith’s head refused to turn toward Shiro’s voice, but he could see him in his periphery, breathing hard, his hand still glowing that unnatural violet. A barrier had sprung up around the three of them; Keith couldn’t tell who had cast it, but it kept Haggar at bay as Shiro and Lance both turned to face Keith. “How?” Shiro asked. “I’ve never heard of sorcery that could control humans.”

Allura breathed out in sudden understanding as she stood, shakily, near the wall where Zarkon’s attack had thrown her. “The Bloodline.”

“Bloodline?” someone hissed—Ulaz, Keith thought.

Shiro stiffened, wheeling toward the archives door, where Zarkon and Sendak still stood. Keith could sense them, if he concentrated. Two pinpricks of light in the back of his mind like eyes, watching him. Pulling his strings. “What did you do to my brother?” Shiro growled.

“They gave him a Bloodline,” Allura said. “Coran, Father said—it’s true, isn’t it? Compulsion.”

Keith felt himself smile a predator’s smile. He’d lost his knife, and his hand still throbbed with pain from Lance’s attack, but his body dropped low, ready for a fight. Lance and Shiro stiffened, but Keith could see it in Lance’s eyes, could hear it in the way Shiro’s breath had gone shallow.

They couldn’t fight him.

They wouldn’t.

“Ulaz!” Thace shouted.

The barrier—or at least the portion of it Keith could see—flickered, just for an instant. Shiro gave a wordless shout, Lance stiffened, and Keith began to turn.

Then Thace barreled into him, knocking him to the ground with one hand pressed against his throat, the tips of his claws digging into Keith’s skin. Keith’s body froze, and his thoughts turned icy with horror. Somewhere nearby, Shiro screamed his name, but the barrier had reformed smaller than before, so close Keith could have touched it if he’d been able to stretch out his arm. Fists pounded against the barrier. Lightning flashed.

Then everything outside the barrier turned to unintelligible chaos as Thace leaned over him, the claws on Keith’s neck pressing harder. It would take so little effort for them to pierce his skin. A quick squeeze, a twist, and Keith would be left bleeding out on the floor.

“I’m sorry,” Thace said. He sounded genuine, and Keith closed his eyes.

 _It’s fine,_ he wanted to say. _I understand. Do whatever you have to to keep me from hurting them._

Keith’s body began to fight back, hands clawing for Thace’s eyes. He leaned back, hardly reacting as Keith’s nails scratched his arms, and calmly pinned one of Keith’s wrists with his free hand. A dart of pain shot through that touch, like a needle being driven into Keith’s skin. A blue glow surrounded Thace for an instant.

A familiar glow, and a familiar pain.

_Sendak broke through the ward before Keith recognized the weakness. He pounced, pinning Keith to the floorboards, sneering as Keith struggled._

“ _You think you can command_ me _?” he snarled, seizing Keith’s wrist in a vice-like grip. A purple glow surrounded him and pain blossomed on Keith’s wrist. “Think again, human.”_

_Then the agony consumed him._

Keith shuddered as the glow vanished from around Thace—and he realized the shudder had been his own. He blinked, breathed in, twitched his fingers.

Thace’s grip on his throat loosened, but he remained crouched over him, eyes sharp. “Patience,” he said. “Give it a moment.”

Keith licked his lips. “What… What did you do to me?”

“We call it the Mark of Marmora. A new Bloodline.” Thace turned his arm subtly, revealing a bluish mark on his forearm, a single sigil overlying an old, complicated scar. A similar mark now glowed faintly on Keith’s skin. “You are not the first to be compelled. Our leader, Kolivan, devised a way to free us by breaking the old bonds, which are what Zarkon uses as the basis for his compulsion. I’m sorry I couldn’t explain it beforehand, but--”

“I would have fought back,” Keith said. “Or, my body would have.”

Thace nodded, posture relaxing almost imperceptibly. He studied Keith for a moment, searching him—perhaps for pain, perhaps for fatigue. “Are you ready?”

Keith snorted. “I’m unarmed, untrained, and completely out of my depth,” he said dryly. “Of course I’m ready.”

Smirking, Thace let a tongue of black fire take root on his shoulder. “Then let’s go.”

He stood, hauling Keith upright with him. They had only a moment to survey the battlefield—Shiro once more fighting Haggar, Lance now fending off Sendak. Allura had gone to kneel by Ulaz, the two of them crafting a storm that kept Zarkon and the rest of his army at bay. Coran, Sam, and Hunk were still drawing on the floor with chalk, the circle now large enough that they’d had to shove a bookshelf out of the way, but Pidge had broken off and knelt behind an upturned table, using Keith’s knife to carve a talisman into the cover of a book.

The shield around them vanished, and Thace’s black flames joined Allura and Ulaz’s storm, halting an assault that might have broken through.

“Pidge!” Keith shouted, and her head snapped up. She carved two last, swift lines into her talisman, then slid it and the knife along the floor—the knife toward Keith, the book toward Lance. Her eyes locked with Keith’s, and he nodded, snatching up his knife as he sprinted toward Lance.

A flash. Sendak striking Lance across the face, snapping his neck.

Keith seized Lance’s wrist and yanked him back before the vision had a chance to come true. They spun, faces close together long enough for Keith to whisper, “Get the book.”

He had no time to explain further, but Lance had that uncanny insight of his, and a sharp mind lurking beneath his flippant exterior. Keith would just have to hope that it would be enough to see the plan through.

They parted ways, Keith dashing forward and skidding on his knees under Sendak’s next strike. He came up swinging, forcing Sendak to turn toward him and put his back to Lance. Keith didn’t slow, unwilling to give Sendak an opening, sparing no thought for anything other than keeping all of Sendak’s attention on him.

Lance snatched up the book, stared at the cover, then over at Pidge. Then he shrugged and chucked it at the back of Sendak’s head.

Sendak froze, utterly immobilized for just an instant, for only as long as it took for the talisman to bounce off his head and out of range. But that was long enough. Keith charged into the opening and drove the tip of his knife into Sendak’s neck.

Sendak stumbled back—back into the range of Pidge’s immobilizing talisman—and crashed to the ground, motionless except for his one remaining eye, glowing bright with rage. Seconds later, the light dimmed.

Keith looked up at a dumbfounded Lance and nodded breathlessly. Lance blinked a few times, then laughed in disbelief. Behind him, Pidge pumped her hands in the air—at least until Hunk’s shout caught their attention.

“Lance! Keith! Pidge! We need you guys—quick!”

* * *

Shiro moved on instinct, half his mind with his brother—standing now, and moving under his own free will. Questions burned at Shiro: how Keith had come to have a Bloodline placed on him, how it was possible for a human to have a Bloodline at all. What else had Shiro missed since Zarkon stranded him here?

But Haggar was still across from him, her face lit in the shifting, otherworldly light of the sorcery around them. Her hands crackled with electricity, but Shiro’s arm burned with an equal measure of Quintessence. _Haggar’s_ Quintessence, forced into him by her mockery of a Blessing.

“Why do you fight me?” Haggar hissed, darting backward as Shiro swung for her. “I gave you power. I gave you _everything_!”

“You gave me _nothing_ ,” Shiro said. “You tried to make me into your weapon—but I don’t belong to you, Haggar. I never did.”

She snorted. “Your Blessing is tied to my Quintessence. If I die, what do you think happens to _you_?”

Shiro had considered the question before. Many times. Ever since Ulaz explained to him how Blessings worked, and how the death of the one who had granted it would twist the Blessing, corrupt it.

He didn’t care. Haggar was a monster. An Altean who had once served the royal family, she had used her position to uncover the seal that had held Zarkon at bay for hundreds of years. It was Haggar who had fed the Persephone Circle the information they needed to complete their gateway ritual, Haggar who had laid the trap at their point of arrival.

It was Haggar who had used the power of their spell to break the seal on Zarkon’s prison, and in so doing had trapped Shiro here with Matt and Sam.

All the horrors Altea had seen in the last year could be laid at Haggar’s feet as surely as at Zarkon’s. If she survived, she would continue on as she had, pressing forward until she saw Zarkon unleashed on Earth. If Shiro had a chance to stop her, he had to take it—whatever the cost to himself.

Haggar was single-minded in her fight. Shiro was her own weapon turned back on her. She knew all too well how easily he could kill her.

Shiro knew too well how far short he fell. He lacked the strength, speed, or skill to best her. They’d been fighting for only a few minutes, and he was already lagging—but unlike Haggar, he never forgot that he wasn’t alone in the room. Ulaz still stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Thace and Allura, but his gaze had darted toward Shiro more than once, waiting for the right moment to strike.

Shiro saw the chance, caught Ulaz’s eye, and stepped aside.

Haggar never even saw the attack coming. Ulaz raised a hand and fired a single bolt of electricity at her back.

She staggered, eyes going wide, and fell, and the sorcery vanished from Shiro’s arm. It felt suddenly heavy and unresponsive, a lump of dead, charred flesh no longer animated by someone else’s life force.

But Ulaz’s moment of distraction had weakened the barrier holding the rest of the army at bay. Zarkon roared his fury, raised his hand, and unleashed a bolt of dark energy. Shiro ducked instinctively, but the attack was not aimed at him.

“ _Dad!_ ”

Shiro spun, his blood running cold, toward the circle on the far side of the room. Pidge and Keith knelt within, along with their two friends and Sam—Sam, who had fallen at the head of the circle, curled in on himself as the light that had begun to gather at the vertexes of the pentacle faded.

The princess roared defiance, charging past Shiro to meet Zarkon head-on.

Time slowed around Shiro, a sudden stillness enveloping him despite the battle still raging. Cards hovered at the edges of his vision, as clear as every time they’d turned up in every single one of his spreads since arriving on Altea. Five cards, all surrounding the Tower.

He turned, counting them off.

 _The Hermit._ Keith, at the second point of the pentacle, pale and drawn, a mark blazing blue on his forearm. Even as Shiro looked at him, the card in his mind changed. No longer the inverted Hermit, a symbol of isolation, but the High Priestess: intuition and the subconscious mind. Keith turned as though sensing Shiro’s eyes, and nodded.

Shiro took a step toward the circle.

 _The Knight of Cups._ One of the boys Shiro didn’t know, tall and thin, his face flecked with blood, who knelt at the third point, watching the army press forward. Today was not a day for charm or romance, but his heart shone bright in the smile he offered for the others, a challenge and a comfort as their circle fractured around the hole caused by Sam’s fall.

Shiro stepped closer to the circle.

 _The Queen of Pentacles._ The other boy, taller and thicker, with chalk on his hands. Security and comfort. He’d left the fourth point on the pentacle to go to Pidge. He rested a hand on her shoulder as Coran lifted Sam and carried him to safety at the back of the archives, where Matt rested.

Shiro paused at the first line of chalk.

 _The Page of Swords._ Pidge, with her sharp mind and curious nature. She watched her father go, tears in her eyes, then glanced up at Shiro and returned her her place at the fifth point, just to the left of the place her father would have occupied.

Shiro stepped into the circle and turned.

 _The Chariot._ Decisiveness and determination.

Shiro knelt in the first space, completing the ring of five.

Five cards. Five allies. All arrayed around the Tower.

Things worked differently on Altea. Shiro was only just beginning to realize that. His mind spread out through the lines of this circle, the way it normally spread out through the cards he used in a reading. He thought perhaps he’d been having trouble with his spreads because he’d been expecting them to work the way they did on Earth: ask a question, get an answer.

Except the cards here hadn’t been answering his questions. All along, they’d been pointing him towards this moment. This ritual. Five witches united in one purpose.

Shiro straightened, fixing his eyes on Zarkon. The princess still fought, holding him back, but she wouldn’t last forever.

“All right, listen up,” Shiro said to the other four gathered in the circle with him. He could sense them, just faintly. He could sense their fear and their uncertainty, and he knew he had to soothe that before they could focus on the ritual. “I know none of you probably set out today to seal the most powerful demon to ever live, but that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

There was silence in the circle, four pairs of eyes trained on the back of Shiro’s head.

“The most important part of any spell is willpower—and you’ve already proved you have that in spades just by being here. Not many humans make it to Altea.”

Keith snorted, the sound bringing a smile to Shiro’s lips. Pidge sat up straighter, and the other two released some of the tension they had been holding in the set of their shoulders.

Shiro closed his eyes, weaving himself into the spell, feeling its currents as they pulled at him, feeling the other four minds intertwined with his. “Focus on the spell. Trust in each other. I’ll lead you through it.”

It felt like an empty boast, the arrogance of a man who only thought he knew what he was doing, but Keith and Pidge plunged under the surface at once, surrendering to Shiro’s guiding hand, and the others weren’t far behind. Power flooded through the circle, rising higher and higher as the lines began to glow with a soft white light.

Behind his closed eyelids, Shiro saw a deck of cards. He reached out for the deck, holding the spell like a tempest in his veins, and flipped over the top card.

_The Tower._

Zarkon shouted in horror, the princess in delight. Shiro opened his eyes and saw a vertical line in the air behind Zarkon, slowly widening into a door. A supernatural wind had picked up in the room, fluttering scattered papers and tugging at Zarkon’s cape. He strained against it, but the princess roared as she condensed a bolt of lightning into a short staff and swung it with all her might. It shattered on Zarkon’s breastplate, and he staggered backward, vanishing through the portal of light.

It closed behind him, leaving silence in its wake.


	8. Epilogue: Ending the Ritual

> _Many would-be summoners overlook the end of a ritual as unimportant, but there’s more to closing a circle than simply shutting a door and walking away. Contracts must be fulfilled or voided, summoned demons dismissed, energy safely dispersed. A hostile demon can take advantage of even the slightest lapse to deal a parting blow, and the distress of an unregulated dismissal can provoke even a demon that has not been previously hostile._
> 
> _Be vigilant. See the ritual through. Tie up all loose threads before allowing yourself to relax._

\--From the Garrison School of Spellcraft’s _Handbook of Demonology_ , Chapter 8: Ending the Ritual

* * *

Cleaning up after a war was hard work.

It shouldn’t have surprised Keith as much as it did. People and demons had died in the war, magic was screwy, and Zarkon’s army was still out there somewhere in Altea—what remained of it, anyway. A large portion had been compelled by their Bloodlines and had fled as soon as the sorcery broke with Zarkon’s sealing.

Thace and Ulaz had persuaded Allura to grant the victims of compulsion clemency, though Keith suspected she’d planned on doing so anyway. She left the task of contacting them to the Cult of Marmora, who were better equipped for such a large-scale search than the decimated castle staff (most lost in Zarkon’s first attack, the rest scattered after King Alfor’s death.)

For her part, Allura was more concerned with hunting down the small core of Galra and Alteans who had been truly loyal to Zarkon. Fearing for Earth’s safety should any of these demons be summoned, Allura had chosen to keep the connection closed until the situation was in hand.

That had meant an abrupt goodbye. Sam had been badly injured by Zarkon’s last, desperate attempt to stop the sealing ritual; Matt was drifting in and out of consciousness, murmuring about ghosts and trying to use Pidge as a pillow; and Shiro was verging on collapse, cradling his right arm against his chest and refusing to let Keith see it.

The humans were all eager to get home, Allura and the others eager to get started on rebuilding. So Pidge had dug out her contract talisman, held it up for Allura to see, and said, “I declare this contract void.” The talisman crumbled to dust—as had Allura’s copy, once she’d repeated Pidge’s words.

Then Pidge had darted forward to wrap her arms around Allura.

“Be safe,” Pidge said. “And thank you.”

Pidge broke away an instant later and turned her attention to drawing out the circle that would return them all home while the others said their goodbyes. After everything else, Keith was afraid the ritual wouldn’t work—but unlike psychic gifts, spellwork apparently didn’t care which realm you were in.

The next few hours were a blur to Keith. Matt was the only one of the lot to noticeably improve upon arriving back on Earth, and he was decidedly worse for wear. Shiro and Sam obviously needed medical help. Somehow Keith ended up in the driver’s seat on the way to the ER, Pidge beside him on the phone with her mom, Matt shouting additions from the back seat while Shiro smiled feebly and Sam remained unsettlingly silent.

Lance and Hunk, following in Hunk’s car but on speaker phone via Keith’s cell, seemed surprised there weren’t more tears—but Keith was used to the Holts. Tears would come later. Not yet. Not as long as there was still something to be done: Mrs. Holt shouting at her secretary to cancel all her appointments even as she raced out the door; Pidge shouting at Keith that speed was relative, and the ten miles over the speed limit he was already going was too slow; Matt shouting just to be heard over all the other shouting.

Then came the hospital, the world’s worst time sink. Shiro, Sam, and Matt disappeared in turn, Karen Holt burst through the door and wrapped Pidge and Keith both in crushing hugs, reporters arrived (though no one knew how they’d already heard about the Persephone Circle’s return), and someone asked Keith whether he wanted someone to look at his hand.

“My what?” Keith asked, too tired by far to figure out for himself what the woman was talking about.

“You hand,” she said, and held up her own like she thought he might not speak English. (Tired as he was, it wasn’t far from the truth.)

Keith looked down at his hand, remembering vague pains that had plagued him all the way to the hospital. It was swollen to twice its normal size and the first finger had acquired an unnatural bend.

“Oh.”

Lance drifted over and winced at the sight of it. “I really did a number on you, didn’t I?”

Turning his hand over to study the remarkable pattern of reddish-purple bruises ringing his hand, Keith shrugged. “Better than what would have happened to Shiro.” He looked up at Lance, who was frowning and dirt-streaked and drooping with exhaustion. “Thanks, by the way.”

“For breaking your hand?”

“For seeing what was happening and stopping me before...”

It was Lance’s turn to shrug, self-conscious and jerky. “It’s nothing.”

It wasn’t, but Keith was too tired to argue. He smiled, bumped shoulders with Lance, then turned and surrendered himself to the care of the emergency room staff.

* * *

“God, that looks good.”

Keith glanced sideways at Shiro, who was all but drooling as he stared up at the TV. They’d made the questionable decision to watch a cooking show rather than the news, Shiro having grown tired of seeing yet more commentary on his own disappearance and miraculous return. (Keith, of course, reminded him that he was still safe here in the hospital, while Sam and Matt, having been discharged long since, had both been faced with rabid reporters on more than one occasion.)

“You don’t even _like_ asparagus,” Keith said. He sat in the chair beside Shiro’s bed, but his feet were propped up on Shiro’s shins—leagues and leagues from the first days, when Keith had hardly dared _touch_ Shiro for fear of breaking him.

Shiro wrinkled his nose, contemplating the TV screen like it was a complicated math problem. “I don’t know. After a year of the tasteless mush Altea calls food, I might be more inclined to appreciate the relative merits of the sweaty socks vegetables.”

Snorting, Keith let his head drop back against the chair. “See, you say that now, but if I actually went to the trouble of making it, you’d act like I’d betrayed you and spit on your dog’s grave.”

“That’s because _you_ can’t cook to save your life.”

The remote sat balanced on Shiro’s knees, and he reached for it with his right hand before stopping, staring momentarily at the stump that ended just below the elbow, and reaching instead with his left hand. Neither he nor Keith commented on the slip; both were still getting used to the empty space where Shiro’s hand had once been.

The doctors were calling it demonic necrosis—tissue death as the result of an unknown type of sorcery. Pidge said that was a bullshit diagnosis and Matt, in an effort to be fair to the medical community on trial in absentia, said it _was_ an accurate summary of the symptoms, even if it did sound like the kind of superstitious diagnosis plague doctors claimed could be cured by blood-letting.

Whatever you called it, the flesh touched by Haggar’s Blessing—if it _was_ a Blessing—had been too far gone to save. From what little Keith had seen of the arm before the demon’s death, it had probably been a lost cause from the start, but the withdrawal of her Quintessence had made amputation unavoidable.

The following days had been filled with a series of tests to ensure that the necrosis wasn’t spreading, that Haggar hadn’t saddled Shiro with any slower-acting curses, and that Shiro’s stump and other wounds were healing well. It wasn’t until six days in, about the time Sam went home, that Shiro got back to anything approaching his usual self.

They’d fit him for a prosthetic a few days ago—a plain silicone fake hand with a socket that went up over his elbow—but it was sitting on the other chair for the moment. (It was, as Shiro put it, a ‘starter hand,’ more for looks than anything; he hadn’t yet decided whether he wanted to get something with more functionality.) The Holts had come by shortly after, and Pidge had quietly stolen the hand, murmuring under her breath with Matt about ‘customization’ and whether a talisman could be made to function like synthetic nerves so the prosthetic could be given more dexterity.

Shiro had leaned over to Keith and whispered, _Should I be worried?_

 _About Pidge?_ Keith had glanced her way, smirking. _Always. But she does know what she’s doing._

Today, finally, Shiro was going to be discharged. Keith and Shiro were staying with the Holts for now, if only to make sure Shiro had a chance to recover. Not like either of them had the money for an apartment, seeing as Keith had lost his scholarship and stipend when he’d been kicked out of the Garrison and Shiro had been officially declared dead a year ago.

As if summoned by Keith’s thoughts, Karen Holt appeared at the door with a business-like knock. Unlike the rest of them, Karen _had_ managed to go back to business as usual. Having her whole family under the same roof again helped, no doubt, but Keith had seen her in the aftermath of the disappearance, her grief carefully controlled and only permitted to slip out in measured doses. That woman could carry on through the end of the world without batting an eyelash.

“Ready to go home?” she asked now, raising an eyebrow at the tangle of legs atop the bed. Keith slumped lower in his chair so his socked feet stuck up higher, then wiggled his toes.

Shiro casually whacked Keith’s arm. “Beyond ready,” he said to Karen. “Just waiting on the paperwork.”

Keith could hear the impatience in his brother’s voice. Impatience, and a longing for familiar surroundings, which had been growing steadily as the days wore on. Smiling, Karen set Shiro’s prosthetic on the bedside table and pulled the chair it had been sitting on closer to the bed.

“I never got a chance to thank you,” Shiro said.

Karen frowned. “What, for letting you stay with us?” She snorted. “You’ve been family for a long time, Takashi. Keith, too, these days.”

“So I hear. Which is why I wanted to thank you, actually. It’s just been me and Keith for so long that… after we got stranded I was worried about him. I’m glad he had you while I was gone.”

Keith rolled his eyes, letting out a vocal sigh to make sure Shiro couldn’t ignore it. “I _am_ an adult, you know.”

Shiro wiggled his hand. “Sorta.”

“Hey!”

Karen just chuckled, and Keith had to wonder if she was thinking what he was thinking: It would be nice to come home to a house that wasn’t missing half its occupants.

* * *

“My family’s abandoned me,” Pidge said, flipping on the oven light and crouching down to check on the progress of the pizza baking inside.

Lance was silent for a moment, and even over the phone she could hear him processing Pidge’s statement and trying to come up with a suitable response. “Abandoned?”

“Yes!” Pidge raised her voice, angling her head toward the living room door, through which she could hear her dad and Hunk talking in quick, excited voices about spellcraft. “ _Abandoned! Deserted!_ They’ve turned their backs on me in my time of pizza-related need.”

Lance laughed, the sound slightly truncated as something forced the air out of his lungs. “Pizza-related need?” he wheezed.

After another moment of staring expectantly at the still-open door, Pidge sighed and gave up her efforts. “Shiro’s coming home today.”

“Finally! I was starting to think they were never going to let him go.”

“Right?” Pidge shook her head. “Anyway, we’re doing pizza and a movie to celebrate. Me, Matt, and Dad were going to make the pizza together while Mom drove to the hospital to get Shiro and Keith, but then Hunk showed up.”

Lance made a noise of understanding. “He finally get the potion right?”

“Yup.” Pidge stood up, turned, and leaned back against the stove. “And, I mean, it’s great. Matt’s dreams have been so vivid since he got back it’s like he doesn’t get any rest at all. Which is great for keeping track of things happening on Altea, but not so much for actual _recovery_. The stuff the doctor prescribed doesn’t work all that well, either—no surprise there. I’m pretty sure this is the first time anyone has seen a case like this.”

“Breaking boundaries left and right,” Lance said, not quite managing to contain the laughs bubbling out of him at whatever was happening on his end. “That’s the Persephone Circle for you.”

Pidge snorted. The loud, clear _thump_ gave her pause for a moment, but she’d learned that with Lance it was usually better not to ask. “Yeah, well I really hope Hunk’s potion works. Matt needs the rest.”

“It’ll work,” said Lance, his voice scrunched up with mild pain. “It’s _Hunk_.”

Pidge’s dad had said the same thing right before he shuttled Matt upstairs to take a nap. He’d then proceeded to waylay Hunk with questions about his summoning technique—Hunk had improvised a little bit on the sealing ritual they’d used on Zarkon, adding some reinforcement at the last minute that, according to Allura and relayed through Matt’s dreams, made the seal stronger than it had ever been. Sam was thoroughly impressed, all the more so because he’d never seen a circle drawn with a similar technique. If he hadn’t officially asked Hunk to join the Persephone Circle it was only because there wasn’t an active circle to join.

Two hours later, Keith texted to say they were leaving the hospital, and Pidge had quietly reminded her dad that they needed to get started on the pizza.

Thirty minutes after _that_ , Pidge had two pizzas in the oven, tossed and topped with no help from the rest of her family, and only Lance on the phone for company.

And of course her dad only noticed the time when the front door opened, adding three new voices to the mix. Rising above them all was Sam’s voice, shocked and guilty as he cried, “The pizzas!”

Pidge rolled her eyes. “I got them, Dad, don’t worry. Parents,” she added to Lance in an undertone. He laughed, then wheezed, and Pidge frowned. “Everything all right over there?”

* * *

“What? Me?” Lance asked, one hand desperately trying to keep the phone pinned to his ear, while the other grappled with Mateo’s vice-like grip around his waist. “No, pshh, I’m totally cool.”

“ _Laaaaance_ ,” Mateo groaned into the small of his back. “Come _on_!”

Grinning, Lance planted his feet, but Mateo’s next tug had some serious heft behind it, and Lance stumbled another two feet toward the door. He latched onto the table as they passed. He was pretty sure Mateo was just dragging him to the living room for some Minecraft or something, but seeing as he’d phrased his request less as a question and more as an impromptu wrestling match, Lance figured he was well within his big brother rights to make the whole thing as difficult as possible.

“Uh-huh,” said Pidge, clearly not believing Lance’s assurances. “Right, well, my family’s home, which means it’s dinner time. Have fun. Try not to get yourself _too_ badly hurt?”

“No promises,” said Lance, and then Pidge hung up, leaving Lance with no more excuses for being a brat. He supposed it was time to admit defeat.

Turning, he lifted Mateo off the ground and tossed him over his shoulder, ignoring the squawks of protest and the kicking feet that came too close to Lance’s nose for comfort. Mateo was still unnervingly light, and he still slept longer than Lance remembered him doing before the Turn, but thanks to Pidge’s talisman, he was up and out of bed every day in time for school, and he usually had enough energy afterwards for family time. His auras were brighter than they’d ever been, too, bursting with starbursts of happiness and deeper swirls of golden contentment.

Grinning as Mateo protested into his shoulder blades, Lance carried him to the living room and flopped him down on the couch. Before he could turn to search through the games, though, Mateo struck, lunging partway off the couch and wrapping his arms around Lance’s legs. Lance stumbled and fell, dragging Mateo the rest of the way off the cushions. They landed in a heap on the floor, and Luz, who had been flipping through her new tarot cards, stared down at them with one eyebrow raised. Lazy green tendrils of disdain split off from her outermost aura.

“Oh, sorry,” Lance said. “Didn’t mean to make you feel left out.” He crawled toward her, Mateo still clinging to his legs, and reached up, ready to pull her down into the wrestling match. She shrieked and pulled her feet up onto her chair, swatting at Lance’s grasping hands. “Stop fighting it, Luz!” he cried. “ _Let me love you!_ ”

Mateo laughed, bright and happy, and Lance couldn’t help the feeling that, for once, all was right with the world.

* * *

It was about a week later that Matt had the dream they’d all been waiting for. He’d been taking short naps every day without Hunk’s dreamless sleep potion, evidently, so that he could keep up on news from Altea, so he knew as soon as Allura was ready to reopen the gateways.

Lance and Hunk summoned her ten minutes later, Hunk’s weekly dinner feast cooking away in the oven. It was only _after_ there was a demon standing in the middle of the kitchen that Lance thought maybe it would have been a good idea to warn his parents beforehand. He didn’t like the neon purple fear and bubbling anger in their auras.

Thankfully Val was there (she considered it a crime to miss out on Hunk’s cooking) and between the three of them they managed to convince the others that Allura was a friendly demon.

Harder was convincing Allura it wasn’t anything personal—though Lance was pretty sure her indignation was mostly an act, if the warm hug she gave him after everything settled down was any indication.

Luz had remained calm through all of it, watching Allura with a tilted head and pastels throughout her auras. She turned now to Lance, humming suspiciously. “This wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with the secret something you were doing a couple weeks ago… would it?”

Lance laughed nervously and turned to Mateo without answering Luz’s question. “Hey. Mateo, this is Allura. She’s going to fix your Blessing.”

This pronouncement brought a new wave of protests from Lance’s parents—and, again, Lance realized a little bit of working up to the demonic summoning might have been a good idea. Hindsight.

Allura was considerably more diplomatic with Lance’s family than she’d been when Lance and his friends had first summoned her, though that might have been due in part to the fact that she’d been _expecting_ this summoning. He still couldn’t help feeling just a little bit offended.

In any case, once it was agreed that Allura was not a threat, she stepped forward, across the lines of warding Lance had broken as soon as he was sure this ritual had grabbed the demon it was _meant_ to, for a change. Taking Mateo’s hand in both her own, Allura closed her eyes. Lance saw the familiar rainbow sheen in the air around her—he was certain by now it had something to do with her magic—and then it was done.

“Just like that?” Mateo asked, turning his hand over. His auras were brightening by increments, from muddy green curiosity to vibrant yellow delight, the scar in his auras that marked his Blessing now threaded through with a delicate, shimmering pink.

Allura clasped her hands before her, smiling. “Just like that.”

Whooping, Mateo went to show Luz his new mark—Lance could just make out an unfamiliar pink design on his skin—and while Hunk and the rest of the family was distracted there, Allura stepped closer to Lance.

“What was the name of the one who gave him his Blessing?” she asked, not looking at him.

Lance studied her, wondering where this was coming from. Maybe some Altean tradition for remembering the dead. He shrugged, lips tugging toward a smile as Mateo traced over the Blessing Allura had given him. “Lealle, I think. Why?”

Allura’s eyes fluttered closed, and she breathed out slowly. “I thought so.”

“You knew her?”

“She was my mother.” Allura managed a smile as Lance and Hunk stiffened in surprise. “She didn’t grant many Blessings, but there was one human, a psychic, she felt she could repay no other way. She gave my mother information about an assassin who was going to come in the night to try to kill me.” She turned then, the air around her warping like a mirage. “I might have died without your grandmother, Lance. I’m glad for the chance to repay the favor.”

Lance smiled, staring down at the arm thrust suddenly into his vision for an instant before Mateo turned and careened onward toward Val. “I’m glad he’s back to his old self.”

“As am I, but that wasn’t what I meant.” Allura held out a hand. “Can I see your hand?”

Stunned, Lance held out his left hand toward her. She took it in both hands, as she’d done with Mateo, and closed her eyes. Line of frost ran out along Lance’s skin, but he was too busy trying to figure out the shimmer in the air and how it tied in to Allura’s sorcery.

Suddenly the shimmer turned into a kaleidoscope, iridescent colors fanning out around Allura like a peacock’s tail. He gasped, blinking a few times as the shifting patterns threatened to overwhelm him, and Allura released him. Slowly the glow around her faded, and she settled back to watch him, smiling faintly.

“Quintessence,” she said, a rainbow shimmering beneath her skin. “It is to my people something like auras are to you. If I’m not mistaken, you’ve already caught glimpses of it.”

Lance nodded numbly and stared down at his wrist, where colorless lines encircled his arm, forming an eye-like design over his pulse. “What…?”

“A Blessing,” Allura said. “To enhance your Sight. As a thank you.”

Lance looked up at her. “I didn’t--”

“You helped save my world. All of you. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to repay you completely, but this is a start.” She smiled at him, then stepped back toward the circle. “Oh, and tell Hunk to summon Coran when he has a chance. We found some ancient records on human magic Coran thought Hunk might like to see, though--” She paused, the pattern under he skin shifting like ocean currents. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s just an excuse to let Coran interrogate Hunk about _his_ magic.”

Lance snickered. “I’ll pass the message along. You sure you have to go?”

“Altea needs me,” Allura said. “Coran now shares my Bloodline, so the link between our worlds won’t be severed when I’m over here, but...” She shook her head, and for a moment her Quintessence was smooth as polished marble. “I should not stay away long. You can always summon me if you need my aid.”

“Thanks,” Lance said. “And good luck.”

* * *

Keith performed the summoning ritual in a secluded patch of forest, the lines sketched out in the dirt with a stick. It was an imprecise medium, but he didn’t want to take this risk anywhere there might be other people around.

Leaves curled inside the circle as frost spread out from the midpoint, a breeze indistinguishable from the natural one whipping through the trees.

Moments later Thace appeared, tense and wary until he recognized Keith.

Half a smile curled his mouth upward. “I was starting to think you would never get around to summoning me.”

“Had some trouble getting away from Shiro,” Keith said. He paused then, staring down at the Mark of Marmora glowing steady blue on his arm. He’d debated whether or not to contact Thace for two days now, and even once he’d made it out here he’d spent an hour debating what question to ask first and how to phrase it. He thought he’d made up his mind, but the question that escaped him first wasn’t the one he’d intended. “So do you _often_ go around handing out not-really-Bloodlines to humans?”

Thace snorted, taking a seat on a fallen log nearby and watching Keith with a critical eye. “Only you. Kolivan wasn’t happy about it, but thanks to Sendak’s Bloodline, you _are_ Galra. He can’t exactly object.”

“I thought you overwrote Sendak’s mark.”

“I did,” said Thace. “But a sorcery like that can’t be wholly removed. The Mark of Marmora suppresses the worst effects—the compulsion, the physical side-effects you would have experienced for killing Sendak… But the other effects will always be there.”

Keith nodded thoughtfully. “Other effects,” he said, staring at his hands. He was silent for a long moment, wondering whether the lines on his palm had changed, or if he’d just never bothered to study them before. “So which is it? A Bloodline thing, or a Marmora thing?”

He didn’t have to clarify what _it_ was; Thace’s smile grew as soon as Keith spoke, however much the Galra tried to mask his pleasure.

“So you’ve noticed.”

Keith raised an eyebrow, stretched out his hand, and stared deadpan at Thace as a nearby bush erupted with black flames.

Thace, damn him, looked pleased. “The capacity for sorcery comes from the Bloodline,” he said, “but it would seem the form it takes was influenced by the Mark.”

“Can you teach me to control it?” Keith asked. “Because I’ve already almost burned down Pidge’s house twice, and I feel like that’s a shitty way to say thanks for everything her parents have done for me.”

“Of course,” said Thace, “though it will take time.”

“Good thing I dropped out of school then, isn’t it.”

“Very well, then.” Thace held out his hand, palm up, and created a small tongue of black flame there. “Let’s begin.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that's it! Thank you all so much for reading and commenting. This fic has been an absolute blast to write! (So much so that I wouldn't discount the possibility of me eventually revisiting the AU--though that won't be until I've wrapped up some of my other projects.)
> 
> In the mean time, if you haven't checked out my other writing, I'm gonna nudge you towards _Love and Other Questions_ (my canonverse soulmate AU with romantic and platonic soulmates) and, if you're into long fics, _Voltron: Duality_ (my ongoing AU epic featuring red paladin!Matt, black paladin!Allura and so much more. Start with Season 1, "Another Word for Never.")


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